While we're on the GPG topic, the thing that's struck me as wrong with the whole UX and key infrastructure is the statefulness and lack of compartmentalization.
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I'm supposed to have keys for people with whom my correspondence is potentially secret, stored in a keyring alongside all my other keys, and visible any time I list/search my keys? WTF.
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GPG doesn't even provide the functionality to specify a file and the key to verify it. It will attempt to use any key in the keyring. To do something like that without needing to carefully check the output afterwards, you need to use separate keyrings for nearly every use of it.
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I've thought it was awful for years, but for a while I signed all my emails with it and encrypted email whenever possible. I've moved on from that and no longer consider it worth using. The usability / security is just too awful, and needing to import so many keys makes it worse.
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Last month, I made a thread explaining that I no longer use it regularly for email for quite some time (at least a year). I'm only willing to use it to bootstrap saner approaches, like Signal. I have Matrix too, but I'm not sure how much I trust that yet.
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By the way, I haven't used PGP for a while beyond bootstrapping better forms of authenticated encryption or signing. I do occasionally deal with looking at the backlog of PGP encrypted emails, and I will sign emails as needed to confirm my identity, but I won't encrypt my mail.
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I used XMPP + OMEMO via Conversations before, but other clients are so terrible and very few of my contacts had interest in using it. I eventually ended up having no contacts on it and stopped using it. In theory, Matrix is a replacement, but I liked Conversations far more...
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And I made another thread about wanting to replace it for signing, which I started: twitter.com/DanielMicay/st. It turned out to be very timely. These threads were triggered by some Enigmail bugs, GPG bugs and the keyservers regularly failing to work for users trying to get keys.
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Even for a simple case like this, GPG is opaque and difficult. There's too much that can and does go wrong. I think people would be better off with a tiny public key to save and confirm out-of-band with it explicitly referenced in the verify command. No complex keyring nonsense.
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