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TheCondor • yesterday at 11:34 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

PGP is special to me, I was a beta user when Phil uploaded it to some Colorado BBSes, way back when. He even made time to talk to teenage me about it on the phone.

What's crazy is when it was concieved, we didn't have trusted strong cryptographic primitives. We did have DES but it wasn't trusted. We did have some of these crazy ideas that we all would have "secrets" and you might put those secrets encrypted on a disk in a vault and you'd not even want the feds to get them. Now we have all sorts of much more vetted crypto primitives, but the idea of actual secrets you'd keep in cold storage is largely dead. You're spot on that modern use cases need different APIs and tools and specialized solutions.