Public Key Encryption and Keybase.io
I have recently signed up for keybase.io, a website which addresses a long standing issue. I got into public key crypto a couple of years back after reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Since then, I probably used it at most 4 times total, with two other people. Although it was designed to be easy to use, it just didn't seem to resonate with me well enough.
Keybase.io, however, solves this problem (of not using it) beautifully, by putting what seems to be a totally modern spin on keyservers. It encourages placing varying degrees of proof in various places over Social Media in order to not only provide a fallback system should keybase not be trusted, but to also link and ensure that the vgmoose on Twitter is the same as the vgmoose on Github, which is the same as the vgmoose that runs this blog.
You can visit my keybase page to see what I mean, or see my posts on Twitter, Github, and this site. Now that I have a common hub that I can point people to, I can see myself using gpg/pgp more and more. Another useful thing about the site is that it will supply you with the curl/gpg commands to run, so you don't even have to rely on their custom (and open) client.
I'm excited to embrace gpg and use it everywhere, with keybase.io helping me keep it all organized. I've already begun signing commits on Github (again) with my key, and over the next coming weeks, I intend to roll out signing for these blog posts and attach gpg signatures to my releases.
If you want to send me a message in the comments that only I can read, simply go here and paste the contents into the comments! Similarly, when I do get around to updating my blog code to support signed posts, you can verify it from that site as well.
I have a bunch of invites for keybase.io left, and not that many friends who are into crypto. If you'd like an invite... encrypt a message for me and leave it as a comment with your email, and I'll send you one. If you don't want to leave your encrypted email, you can also post your public key and I'll reply with a an encrypted message containg an invite link just for you.
Cool stuff!