Convalesco

Apple Inc. has been pedantic for many things. One of these is the lack of support for PGP. Truth is, encryption is badly needed in today’s world. Email encryption is at hand. Today’s technology solved the most dangerous aspect of encryption, with the introduction Public Key Exchange.

While, technology has served well on this matter, people seem to ostensibly ignore the use of encryption. Of course, those who don’t want to trade a few extra clicks with a secure communication, don’t deserve a secure communication by default. This choice however, affects a large part of internet savvy tech users. It would be much more difficult for eavesdroppers to handle a couple of thousands of encrypted emails, than a dozen of them. Not to mention the possibilities of the digital signature that comes with the emails against spam, etc.

It’s hard to understand Apple’s policy on many things. I still remember the buzz about the iPhone SDK, before it was released. Same goes for other things. To mention the most current, everyone is trying to understand why did they turn Quicktime Pro from a swiss army knife of video formats to a wooded knife that no one cares to use anymore. No one can really understand why would someone want just another program that will help you upload your video to YouTube automagically, while it will hide all that tiny little options that made Quicktime a winner. I’ve spoken to a couple of MacOSX application developers, they all were amazed by the silly choice.

Back to the PGP thing now. It’s not a big deal. It takes 40 hours for an external programmer to do some trial & error research in order to  write a bundle for the Mail.app . How many hours could it take for the OSX developers to do likewise… Five?

Many people don’t use cryptography on their disk partitions, however there is a very handy disk utility that handles the entire procedure in a human way. There’s always the Truecrypt alternative which I consider like 10 times safer for many technical reasons, but the AES-256 encryption is build-in!

Now that GPGMail will not be supported on Snow Leopard, we’re out of lack! I’m going to use the command line for encrypted emails. No, I don’t use them regularly, but we are in 2009 after all. This is MacOSX v10.6 and the Mail.app is v4.0. Mature enough for a build-in GPG support. In my opinion, Apple should be shipping GnuPG2 implemented on Mail.app by default, along with the usual apple-style “click-and-go” application for creating personal keys, which you can use for disk encryption also.

Although I am a kinda addicted with Apple products, I still can’t understand the obsessive lack of support for some regular things. Apple’s user-base has an important percentage of ex UNIX – chose a flavor, there’s one for every taste – users. They should pay some respect to them as to any other user which needs such a basic functionality…