Gmail, Privacy, and Adventure!

So, when I first heard about gmail, I was a little concerned about the privacy issue. Your e-mail is never deleted. Your e-mail is scanned for keywords, and then unobtrusive text ads are inserted on the side. To be honest, they've never bothered me. You learn very quickly to ignore them, and then it's as though they were never there. But because your e-mail is never deleted and it's scanned, privacy could be a worry for a lot of people.

Until I got a new toy. WinPT is a front-end for GPG, which is a freeware version of the incredible encryption tool, PGP. I had a couple of PGP keys that I created using the freeware version of PGP, but I was always annoyed at how un-user-friendly it seemed as a freeware app, and I didn't want to cough up money to upgrade something that struck me as un-user-friendly in a demo. WinPT is easy to use, and compatible with PGP. And it allows me to encrypt, send, and decrypt messages in gmail. Yee-haw! And because gmail is where the "Mail Me" link goes to, and because some people may not want their e-mails to me to be available to prying eyes (no matter how much of a long shot that is), I added my public PGP key to the column to the right. It's just below the XML button in the sidebar. So, you conspiracy theorists out there can now e-mail me and be sure that no one reads it but me - a single PGP message, with 260 million computers working on it simultaneously would take an estimated 12 times the age of the universe to crack, according to Simon Singh's "The Code Book".

WinPT also allows you to encrypt files on your disk using your PGP key, it will wipe files from your disk (erasing them more thoroughly), but it doesn't do dishes. Yet.