Afraid an unauthorized someone is reading your personal e-mail? Then prevent it by encrypting your e-mail using a program such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). PGP was invented in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann as a way to send e-mail so . . .
Afraid an unauthorized someone is reading your personal e-mail? Then prevent it by encrypting your e-mail using a program such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). PGP was invented in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann as a way to send e-mail so that no one but the intended recipient could read it. It landed him in a world of legal trouble with the feds until they dropped the case after pressure from the computer industry in 1996.

However, after Network Associates bought PGP in 1997, development started to drift, and by 2001 work on the software had ground to a halt. Network Associates had effectively shelved the software. Thankfully, the newly funded PGP Corp., based in Palo Alto, Calif., bought the software and released new versions in November 2002 that run on both Windows XP and Mac OS X.

First off, don't confuse codes and ciphers. Codes are agreed upon substitutions of words and phrases, like "the baby is in the crib" for "the package has arrived." Ciphers are mathematical formulas that transform messages into gobbledygook. An example of a simple cipher is one that has A=1, B=2, C=3, and so on. So the word "subway" would be represented as 19-21-2-23-1-25. You could make it more complicated by reversing the order of the numbers--so that A=26, B=25, etc.--or you could stick with the original order and multiply the numbers by an arbitrary number, say 7. "Subway" would then be 133-147-14-161-7-175.

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