Network Associates sold off its PGP products to a new company founded specifically to market PGP technology. This has to be good news, because Network Associates did absolutely nothing useful with PGP while they had it. Hopefully this new company has hired some real software engineers that can take the basic PGP code (which is very simple) and turn it into something usable by the majority of people. Encryption aside, routine use of digital signature to verify one’s identity is something that’s long overdue, and it’s because the software to make it easy just hasn’t caught on. I think the fundamental reason is that most email is trivial in nature and people don’t really care enough to verify the sender of email they recieve, but for certain applications, digital signatures are really useful. Another advantage of PGP becoming more mainstream is that it would provide a limited alternative to some of the trusted computing crap that’s going to be shoved down our throats in the near future, ostensibly for our own good.