Top all-time · #1180
Philip Zimmermann
Personal blog · philzimmermann.comsecurityhistory
Philip Zimmermann writes Phil Zimmermann's Home Page, a personal blog at philzimmermann.com about security and history. Since 2008, 61 different Hacker News readers have linked it 83 times, most often “Why I Wrote PGP (1999)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Home page for Philip Zimmermann, creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), the most widely used email encryption software in the world
Most-linked posts?
- Why I Wrote PGP (1999)11 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2014-07-22
- Author's Preface to the Book: “PGP Source Code and Internals”8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-10-03
- Why I Wrote PGP (1999)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2012-05-05
- Human-oriented base-32 encoding6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2017-02-26
- Why I Wrote PGP (1999)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-08-08
- Beware of snake oil4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-04-19
- PGP Marks 30th Anniversary3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-06-07
- /docs/human-oriented-base-32-encoding.txt2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-20
- How to Contact Phil2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-28
- PGP2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-08
What Hacker News says?
In one sense, the anti-crypto forces are not yet being as crazy as they have been at certain times in the past. People often forget that the federal government wanted to put Phil Zimmerman in prison over PGP in the nineties. [1] In another sense, this is much crazier. There wasn't much at stake commercially in the nineties, but today, legislatively screwing up crypto could compromise trillions of dollars worth of co…
Comment linking /EN/news/PRZ_case_dropped.html
on “Oppose the Earn IT Act”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP (1999) as a story · 422 points
HN discussionTrue. But pretty good privacy might be worth considering in this context - it was at one point published as a book after all... https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html
Comment linking /EN/essays/BookPreface.html
on “All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP (1999) as a story · 257 points
HN discussionhttps://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html "Why I Wrote PGP", by Philip Zimmermann We really need to emphasize the envelope metaphor a lot more. It's much easier for non-technical propel to understand than any discussion of key/signing/etc.
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP (1991, revised 1999) as a story · 189 points
HN discussionAnd zbase32 ( https://philzimmermann.com/docs/human-oriented-base-32-encod... ), which is my own preference for still being case-insensitive and thereby able to be used in subdomain names or email addresses.
Comment linking /docs/human-oriented-base-32-encoding.txt
on “Linus on Git and SHA-1”Submitted PGP Marks 30th Anniversary as a story · 185 points
HN discussionIt's not a legend, it's easy enough to confirm. https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html
Comment linking /EN/essays/BookPreface.html
on “Why I Wrote PGP (1999)”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP (1999) as a story · 149 points
HN discussionThe same sort of play was made after the Oklahoma City bombing: https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “Why Apple Is Right to Challenge an Order to Help the F.B.I”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP (1999) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionThe line at the end that really hit me was this: > Almost all the attackers were known to the authorities, and if they had been watched, their use of encryption programs would have itself invited closer scrutiny. This is precisely the scenario that Phil Zimmermann (creator of PGP) and others have been warning about (and working against) for decades. As Zimmermann said in a 1999 essay linked here not long ago, "What…
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “A Back Door to Encryption Won't Stop Terrorists”Submitted Phil Zimmermann: Beware of Snake Oil Crypto (1997) as a story · 70 points
HN discussionThis is exactly why tech/internet companies should have been spending the last year educating people about why encryption is important and just how much of their lives relies on crypto. The FBI has been running their own propaganda campaign, but when James Comey talks about the supposed "need" for backdoors, the common response by the people that understand crypto is to talk about how stupid Comey's suggestion was,…
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “Mark Zuckerberg Backs Apple in Its Refusal to Unlock iPhone”Submitted Letters to Philip Zimmermann on how human rights groups used PGP to protect against death squads as a story · 12 points
HN discussion1) Sometimes it's not about you . Currently, the NSA (and others, presumably) consider the presence of encryption as part of their is_suspicious() heuristic. Other people do have need for encryption, and by saying "I (currently) have nothing to hide", you are saying that you are fine with a high correlation between "uses encryption" and "is doing something suspicious". More than any other reason, we need to dilute t…
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “Marking HTTP as Non-Secure”Submitted PGP Marks 30th Anniversary as a story · 11 points
HN discussionPhil Zimmermann used postcards as the analogy in his Why I Wrote PGP essay in 1991: https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “Senate encryption bill draft mandates 'technical assistance'”Submitted Philip Zimmermann: Why I Wrote PGP (1999) as a story · 5 points
HN discussion"What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting the…
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “FBI director: Cover up your webcam”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWoah, I didn't know that Joe Biden was the sponsor of the exact bill that Phil Zimmerman referenced in his essay, “Why I Wrote PGP”. From the OP: “On the other hand, as a senator in the 1990s, Vice President Joe Biden introduced a bill at the FBI's behest that echoes the bureau's proposal today. Biden's bill said companies should "ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text cont…
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “FBI pushing for surveillance backdoors on websites”Submitted Manual to Phil Zimmermans PGPfone Circa 1996 [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThough it would appear the source of the original PGP software is no longer publicly accessible [1], so how would one know if it was vulnerable? I think the EFF probably meant people using various implementations right? [1] https://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/
Comment linking /EN/findpgp/
on “A new set of vulnerabilities affecting users of PGP and S/MIME”Submitted How to Contact Phil as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm a fan of z-base-32 for this. https://philzimmermann.com/docs/human-oriented-base-32-encod... Command line tool at https://github.com/tv42/zbase32 $ echo hello, world | zbase32-encode pb1sa5dxfoo8q551pt1yw $ entropy 16 | zbase32-encode y64s31aq6cgjoko9fwbuasf4ce
Comment linking /docs/human-oriented-base-32-encoding.txt
on “Understanding and avoiding visually ambiguous characters in IDs”Submitted PGP Marks 30th Anniversary as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWell, ask the creator of PGP: > Whatever it is, you don't want your private electronic mail (email) or confidential documents read by anyone else. https://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html It was designed for private electronic mail . Or the PGP FAQ linked by the MIT keyserver: > PGP is a program that gives your electronic mail something that it otherwise doesn't have: Privacy. https://pgp.mit.edu/i…
Comment linking /EN/essays/WhyIWrotePGP.html
on “Why can't my mom email me?”Submitted Why I Wrote PGP (1991) as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
