Funny story: Once, when trying to impress a woman who was a self-professed ‘geek’ I thought I would be romantic by sending her a haiku inside of an encrypted file.
When she received it, it read:
—–BEGIN PGP MESSAGE—–
Version: BCPG v1.63
hQEMA3IXr8FRRwxtAQgAvA+SUDh7P9lABNYOU1bLjDAZh0udxTsMT/z4OmZ/c1V8
u1yLLlzW2h9XSLeT371eW/o2xJHecYc7lUrfOMXrMdubYZAVOtRtoRvzAFHCIzjm
0nbmOTzOmtVTI2VccMzH62yGfC3djdMVpBGZdv1CPojIV/RxSX/3jLgiWskdni2Y
xXv4NEbN1dVyRb6u9Kq24kdwwd25wTTbauGyj6zp+/fpI/wCQtifk5MBJlrXIatU
yMADu3CwTWHIt1zQYhsUU9ahGMbpYs6pg50v69J6c20TJZkTdME3NRSNGzjCTD/a
wZZuiEZfEODe/LCrCjg/ed1sNzjOYlTVxviXE7gEydJHAfC1l09QBE0ZowmZFMxG
95Xzxxfm6nis2MLGjoBbAclJuVSf/fqrlnaMlmVlgiRtT09+ggwYgkMfHrJr3p02
KTUmkKX39+8=
=zcsx
—–END PGP MESSAGE—–
Even though I was told that women like mysterious men – she wasn’t interested in isntalling PGPTool and decoding my haiku, so I sat alone that Valentines day! 😡 – that was ok though, at least I found out she wasn’t the geek she professed to be! (I like non-geeky people too by the way – but I was trying to see if she was a true hacker)
In this blog post, I am going to share with you some software I found recently, that does a good job at encrypting sensitive text, which can then be either stored online, sent to a friend, or printed out for later retrieval.
It’s called PGPTool , and you can get it here: https://pgptool.github.io/#
When encrypting text using PGP Encryption, you will first need to generate 1) A private key, and 2) a public key. PGPTool will help you with this.
Next, ask for your friends public key (if they are super cool, are a journalist, or know Edward Snowden, they may have already made their public key available online – which you can search for using their email address here: https://keys.openpgp.org/)
Finally, type your message in PGPTool, and use the software to encrypt the text – copy and paste it into your email program, (or secret file) and you are done!
Pretty simple right?
If you would like a video tutorial, please let me know – however, with a quick YouTube search, I found one here:
Please note, in order for this software to run on your computer, you may need to install Java: https://java.com/en/download/
In case you want to send me a haiku on valentines day in a PGP encrypted message, my public key: PauG Preibisch2020_public_pgp_key– and I promise you might just get a nice Valentine in your inbox!
