Rimu's blog

It appears that New Zealand is becoming a bit more of a police state, with pretty much all internet activity able to be monitored. This feels a bit creepy, so in response I've taken the 10 minutes necessary to learn how to encrypt my email.

LifeHacker has a quick and simple guide for those using Thunderbird on Windows. I'm on Linux so my package management system installed the Enigmail extension that is required, rather than me needing to manually download it.

There's a nice wizard to guide me through the setup so everything went smoothly, although configuring some file permissions were a touch tricky and I needed to read the documentation to figure out how to get a copy of my public key.

To send me encrypted email you'll need my public key.

Because of the way the maths works, all I can do it set myself up to be able to receive encrypted email from others - if I want to send encrypted email then the receipent needs to have set themselves up in a similar manner already, and I need to know their PGP public key. So it's a bit clunky and limited.