Quote from: kmfkewm on September 11, 2012, 12:26 pmYou can think of the public key as being an open lock, which you give to the people who you want to be able to communicate securely with you. You can image it as the people you have shared your open lock (public key) with putting their messages to you in a secure box and locking it shut by closing your open lock on it. Now even they can not open the lock. You keep the private key yourself, in a combination safe. The combination to the safe is your passphrase. After providing your passphrase, the combination safe is opened and the private key is used to unlock you closed lock and take the message out. GPG doesn't actually require that you understand much of this, simply that you know the basics of public and private keys. We always need more ways of using visual metaphors to explain PGP. I find once people "get" one of the visual metaphors, they are much much less likely to get confused or make elementary mistakes, even if they don't fully understand the particular procedure on their OS and PGP GUI implementation. Because of this, I intend to use a lot of different visualizations to represent the exact same thing when my tutorials are completed. People's brains are often just wired differently, something that seems a bit weird and obscure to most people can hold the key to understanding for some other people.It's not just repetition that is the mother of all learning as it is said, because you can also produce very good parrots this way too, it is also redundancy. I think redundancy in multiple explanation of the same material is a major stumbling block at every level of education.I think the painful truth is that a lot of the elite students in a classroom, were merely the ones that sought an alternative explanation instead of the main textbook's formalisms, while the rest grind on with a source material that is obstructionist. There is a ton of "magical thinking" going on in high schools and universities these days, but it's not a new culture. I remember Richard Feynman in a radio broadcast saying that literally every single Brazilian student of engineering, physics he met, had not an iota about what they were reading. The students would all memorize the textbooks, afraid of being left behind in the race for academic credentials.This is what happened:Feynman was in Brazil training students to become teachers (in fact, they were going to be Brazil's *first* group of science teachers) and he started to discover something rather strange. He could ask a question and the students would answer correctly and adeptly. Then he would ask the same question, the exact same question in the exact same subject, and they wouldn't understand him at all. He eventually worked out that although he could use a phrase such as "light such that it is reflected through a medium with an index", the students had no idea that this could mean a *medium meant a material such as, you know, water*. And so, a subtle word alternation meant they couldn't generate an output.At this rate, human beings who do this, are not any better than a machine. Because that's what machines do. They process symbols we call data, but do not comprehend the meaning. If you process data, but don't comprehend what it actually means, then you are a just a machine. The lowest form of intelligence possible! Record! Replicate! That's as dumb as non-living things like DNA! Even some machines may perform better than a human in this situation!If I wasn't to be a drug smuggler, I would have wanted to be a teacher, but not only is the economics impossible for you do not get paid even twice for being 10x more effective than the next fellow, but the entire profession is filled with "machines" like the one I just described, who go on to replicate themselves amongst the students they supposedly teach.Lack of money I might have been able to take, I am good with money and can easily turn 1 dollar into 2, but this stupidity? Perpetuating itself because the staff wish to keep the status quo of imbeciles? Never.In my view, 75% of all the teachers in American and European high schools ought to be fired immediately, without any pay or benefit.The 25%, which are mostly just "ok" because they haven't been sufficiently tainted by the system, or are of unusually persistent character, should then engage with something like Khan Academy, where students learn at home, only coming into the classrooms in order to finish their homework.Would be an improvement?Let me emphasize, that were all the students left entirely to their own devices, they would still obtain a better level of education than they do high schools. This is why I have sympathy for those creationists who take their kids out of schools and home school them instead. It's not actually just they don't like evolution being taught to their kids (for which I have no sympathy, I consider evolution theory a very critical idea for reasons beyond just biology), that's just one single caveat, it's that they have a problem with the entire system. Maybe they don't express it as such, but I have a feeling they've intuited, correctly, that their kids will be more confident, more educated and have more enthusiasm for things like Science overall, than if they went to a traditional high school.I was at a friend's house a while back, and they were watching "Waiting for Superman", a documentary on the American high school system, I didn't say anything, but I became so angry I had to leave the room, there are things that would make stones weep. If you think I'm joking, go and watch it for yourself.QuoteThat sums up the basic commands required to use GPG from the command line. Of course you can do a lot more with GPG, symmetric encryption, hashing, file encryption, signatures and validation, etc, but I am not going to cover all of those unless people specifically request that I do. I hope that this shows that using GPG from the command line is trivial and that using GPG in general is trivial. I believe that this tutorial is fully cross platform. You do not need any fancy GUI or OS specific bullshit to make full use of GPG, and in fact I find that controlling it entirely from the command line is far less of a hassle. It is also far more secure as now an attacker sending you malicious ciphertexts can only hope to exploit a vulnerability in the core GPG engine, instead of the GUI package or wrapper you are using for GPG.That may be so, but the command line is terrifying to most users of Windows and Macintosh. It's a psychological hurdle so great that if you only show potential PGP users how to use the command line, you risk losing most of them altogether.