More and more people want powerful, easy-to-use encryption software, but the commercial world isn't providing it. Can open source deliver? But online security, just like everything else, is subject to the ebb and flow of capitalism -- and the relentless releases . . .
More and more people want powerful, easy-to-use encryption software, but the commercial world isn't providing it. Can open source deliver? But online security, just like everything else, is subject to the ebb and flow of capitalism -- and the relentless releases of new software products with which one must be compatible. Updated operating systems from Microsoft and Apple require updated versions of PGP, but Network Associates is currently not making the necessary improvements. Koh and tens of thousands of other PGP users have been forced to seek alternatives.

Increasingly, they're finding haven in a small corner of the open-source software world, bringing both opportunity and new users to an oddly named and heretofore little-known programming effort fueled by volunteers: GnuPG.

The synergies of the relationship are obvious: open-source software and cryptography are two sublimely geeky obsessions that go well together. But the story of how GnuPG is coming to the cryptogeek rescue also illuminates some of the limitations of open-source, or free software. Even a relatively slick consumer product like PGP has been deemed too technically challenging by many normal computer users -- despite widespread anxieties about privacy on the part of the general Internet-using population. And making a software program easy to use is exactly the challenge that open-source software has historically been weakest at meeting.

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