9. References

This chapter contains information and pointers to information about topics related to PGP and Mailcrypt.

9.1 Online Resources

http://cag-www.lcs.mit.edu/mailcrypt/

"Mailcrypt: An Emacs/PGP Interface", by Pat LoPresti. This page has been the Mailcrypt homepage since October 10, 1995. It is still the distribution site for version 3.4 of Mailcrypt--a rock-solid version still to be recommended if you use only PGP 2.6.x.

http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto.html

"Cryptography, PGP, and Your Privacy", by Fran Litterio. This page is simply excellent. It makes all the other References in this chapter redundant, but we will include them anyway for redundancy.

http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html

MIT is the canonical distribution site for PGP; this is the announcement page.

ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/alt.security.pgp/

This is an archive site for the `alt.security.pgp' FAQ lists.

news:alt.security.pgp

The `alt.security.pgp' newsgroup is a good place to go for discussion about PGP, as well as any topic which any fool anywhere ever thinks is related to PGP. It is also a good last resort for getting answers to questions, but please read the FAQ lists first.

http://pgp.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html

Brian LaMacchia (bal@zurich.ai.mit.edu) has put together a World Wide Web interface to the public key servers (see section 9.2 Key Servers). Mailcrypt uses this interface by default when attempting to fetch keys via HTTP (see section 5.3 HTTP Fetch); most people get to his interface through this page.

ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/cypherpunks/Home.html

The Cypherpunks are dedicated to taking proactive measures to ensure privacy in the digital age. They wrote the software for, and operate many of, the anonymous remailers currently in existence.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~raph/

Raph Levien actively maintains a remailer list which Mailcrypt knows how to parse. If you are impressed by how easy it is to configure Mailcrypt's remailer functions, Raph is the one to thank. Raph's page also has many useful links.

http://www.obscura.com/~loki/

Lance Cottrell is the author of Mixmaster. His home page is the canonical source for information on Mixmaster and is a good source for PGP pointers in general.

http://www.gnupg.org/

Homepage for the GNU Privacy Guard. This is a GPL-ed replacement for PGP.

9.2 Key Servers

Key servers are machines with a publicly accessible interface to an enormous global public keyring. Anyone may add keys to or query this keyring. Each key server holds a complete copy of the global keyring, and they arrange to keep one another informed of additions they receive.

This means you can tell any key server to add your public key to the global keyring, and all of the other servers will know about it within a day or so. Then anyone will be able to query any key server to obtain your public key.

To add your key to the keyservers, send an Email message to pgp-public-keys@pgp.ai.mit.edu with a subject line of `ADD' and a body containing your public key block. With Mailcrypt installed, you can just type C-c / x to insert your public key block (see section 2.3 Inserting a Public Key Block) into the body of the message.

For help with the Email interface to the key servers, send a message with a subject line of `HELP'. For a World Wide Web interface to the key servers, see Brian LaMacchia's home page at http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/.

Some other key servers include:

• pgp-public-keys@jpunix.com

• pgp-public-keys@kub.nl

• pgp-public-keys@uit.no

• pgp-public-keys@pgp.ox.ac.uk

For a complete list, consult any good online repository of PGP information (see section 9.1 Online Resources).

It is strongly recommended that you submit your key to the key servers, since many humans and programs (including Mailcrypt) may look for it there. Besides, it takes mere seconds and the pain passes quickly.

9.3 Mailing List

The `mc-announce' list is reserved for announcements of new Mailcrypt versions, so it has extremely low volume. We encourage you to add yourself so we can get a rough idea of how many people are using our package.

9.4 Politics

Cryptography in general, PGP in particular, and free software are politically somewhat controversial topics. Heck, in the U.S. Congress, freedom of speech is a controversial topic. Anyway, here are some organizations you should definitely watch and preferably send lots of money.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The EFF (http://www.eff.org/) works to protect civil liberties in cyberspace. They also maintain an impressive collection of on-line resources. If you like Mailcrypt so much that you wish you had paid for it, this is the number one place we would want to see your money go. The EFF newsgroups, `comp.org.eff.news' and `comp.org.eff.talk', are required reading for the well-informed.

The League for Programming Freedom

The LPF (http://www.lpf.org/) works to fight software patents, which threaten to make free software like Mailcrypt impossible.

The Center for Democracy and Technology

The CDT (http://www.cdt.org/) has essentially the same goals as the EFF, but is more of a lobbying group.

Mailcrypt's remailer support was inspired by the Communications Decency Act of 1995 (see http://www.cdt.org/cda.html) and by the International "Church" of Scientology (see http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/rnewman/scientology/).

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