Encryption Turns a Network Security Problem Into a Key Management Problem

After over a decade, the time has finally come…
someone sent me an email encrypted with my PGP public key.

Based on the timestamp on my website, I set up GnuPG in 2007, which is two computers and about four hard drives ago. And while I'm a digital pack rat, those were the days that "copy your entire old computer to your new computer" would still cramp your new computer's space. So I would manually copy the home directory contents I knew I'd want like Documents and .vimrc but I probably didn't notice my private key file.

So for more than a decade I've been advertising a way to send me an email that no one can intercept and decrypt… including myself. 🤦‍♂️