Just in case you happen to need it, here’s my PGP (or GPG) key: http://www.ianmcorvidae.net/mcewen.ian.pgp (Also available on keyservers everywhere).

For those of you that know nothing about PGP and GPG (likely many of you), PGP is really short for OpenPGP, which is an RFC (Request for Commands; essentially, a document on new research and innovation) that was made into a standard by vote of the IETF. GPG is a shortened version of GnuPG, a free and open implementation of the OpenPGP standard. PGP originally stood for “Pretty Good Privacy;” it is one of the more-used standards on the internet (and, contrary to its ironic name, is one of the better systems out there) for encryption and information privacy.

The key I share above is the public half of a two-part key that is necessary to encrypt and decrypt messages and files, or simply to sign email. The public key allows decryption of a signature or email or file, but not encryption, which requires the private key in addition; therefore, it can be safely determined that the email or file originates with the owner of the key if it has the proper text included. I sign all my email with GPG; this does not require my recipients to use any OpenPGP implementation, but does ensure the email comes from me to those that do; in addition, should I need to encrypt emails, by exchanging public keys with the person with whom I would like to exchange encrypted emails, I can safely create safely encrypted messages.

If you’d like more information on OpenPGP and GPG, or would like to start using OpenPGP to sign and encrypt your messages, look around on Wikipedia or the respective sites of implementations for information or contact me using the Contact page. Some commonly-used email clients for OpenPGP are Mozilla Thunderbird with the Enigmail extension, or Hushmail, an online provider. However, most clients have some form of support for PGP, so if you are interested in using it, google is likely to have an answer.