GPG is the free implementacion of the Pretty Good Privacy system. This allows you to sign and encrypt messages to other people, and if we sign each other our keys you can also verify that the person you know is who actually wrote the email.
Send your public key by mail to anybody from the #slug, and come over next Wednesday to get more people to sign it.
Encryption is not as complicated as it sounds, check out this howto for making your own gpg key in case you don’t have one yet, this video tutorial for using Thunderbird Enigmail plugin, and this other tutorials for GPG.
What you can bring to the party:
- Little pieces of paper with your gpg key information (specially your fingerprint).
- Fruits, tea, juice.
- You don’t need to take your computer
- You don’t need to take your id (Yes, in all the howtos talks about the ID but we don’t need it)
- Don’t forget to send your gpg public key to the organizer
What you will have after the party:
- A list of people you can mail encrypted mail with
- A list of keys to sign and make a bigger trust ring
- More information about gpg programs and gpg security
Why we do this:
Is important to increase the amount of encrypted mail to make it more difficult to analize and decrypt. The safety of encryption systems is a balance between the amount of information to decypher and the computing power of the spy… if we have enough encrypted mail they will never reach to decrypt the more importatn ones!