[conspire] Offering GPG/PGP Workshop at CABAL

[Rick Moen]

Quoting K Sandoval (indigo.kai at gmail.com):

> Should I try to perform the steps for generating keys, or can I
> generate the keys at the workshop?
> 
> What if I generated keys previously, over a year ago and lost all the
> info?  I think it might be linked to either my gmail email or my yahoo
> email address.

I just did some checking on this matter, and it appears that GMail has
no built-in support for PGP/GPG keys and encrypted mails.  You can
retrofit such support using a Greasemonkey script
(http://www.langenhoven.com/code/emailencrypt/gmailencrypt.php).  That's
basically a hack that rewrites Google's Javascript on the fly, adding
crypto support to the pages you're interacting with.

_However_, your keys would still reside locally.

I find no facilities to do even that much in Yahoo Mail.

Also, just to point out:  Even if you _did_ have one of these mail
services "linked" to use of your PGP key, you'd always have your private
half of the keypair strictly locally, not on the mail service.  So,
you'll not find it there.

If you can't find your old keypair, give it up and make a new one!

> I think it was a PGP key?  How do I find out the status of this
> previously created key?

Sounds as if the status is "Kai misplaced it."  ;->  There are places
you can register the _public_ half of a PGP/GPG keypair, such as public
keyservers.  That lets other people find it more easily.  However, it
would defeat the purpose of the private key to keep it anywhere that's
not controlled by you.  (By default, it's stored encrypted by a
symmetric cipher as a precaution, such that you have to access it via a
"passphrase" key, but you don't want to go around giving people copies,
encrypted or not.)