According to the powers that be end-to-end encryption as we know it might be one of those things like the prosperity of the 1990’s that we can only reminisce about in the near future. Now as, always the most secure way to transit messages over a secure channel (i.e. any sort of online service, even one which implements end-to-end encryption is to handle encryption yourself.) For those of you that use Mac OS X, there’s not a better, simpler way to do it than NouveauPG.

NouveauPG is a mature product that has been out for many years and is compatible with virtually all other PGP software on the market the one caveat (and I cannot stress this enough) you can not import private keys from another PGP program. There are really good reasons for doing so, not to get technical but PGP has been around since 1993. I’m not even young and I was in grade school back then. AES, the gold standard for symmetric encryption was not even invented back then! The patent for RSA didn’t expire until 1991. Most existing implementations are still under coded under the assumption that memory is far, far more expensive than it is now.

I’m planning a promotion in honor of this current attention given to crypto (I remember this came up in the Bill Clinton administration!) Stay tuned!