[ale] gnupg signatures

[Ken Kennedy]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 10:46:23AM -0500, Swantje Willms wrote:
> I'd like to find out more. The FAQs I've found don't help much.
> 
> Especially, the legal info is very sketchy. E.g. the MIT site says "PGP is
> distributed by MIT only to U.S. citizens in the United States, or to
> Canadian citizens in Canada." So, if I'm not a US citizen, do I get it
> somewhere else? Or am I not allowed to have it at all? Where would I look
> for this information? My Web searches don't bring up anything; export
> regulations don't really apply because I live in the US...
> 

Well, easy solution is to use GPG, not PGP. PGP is now owned by
Network Associates (though they're trying to sell it), the freeware
product is licensed only for non-commerical, personal use, and as such
is not Free Software. GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) is a Free Software
implementation of the OpenPGP standard (RFC 2440), and is generally
compatible with PGP.

The legal situation is a pain...MIT is basically trying to cover all
their angles with their download setup. If you're not a US citizen
(even if you're living in the US, unless you've been lawfully admitted
for permanent residence in the United States under the Immigration and
Naturalization Act?), then technically you'd be in violation if you
lied on the site. 

You can also get the software from www.pgpi.org, but again, I'd
suggest using gpg instead. You can get that from www.pgpi.org as well,
or from www.gnupg.org, or perhaps with your distribution
(depending). It's in debian/non-us, for example.

Ken

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