Hey eldo, thanks for the breakdown! Luckily for me and Martin, I was bored during class and we sent emails back and forth til we got it right. Couple that with the fact that I can finally understand SSH and VNC and I have had a darn productive night (thanks statik lol). <div>On 6/7/07, Eldo Varghese <<a href="mailto:poningru@ufl.edu">poningru@ufl.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> How GPG works on a basic level a person has a secret key and a public key the person passes out their public key to people physically, as in inorder to fully trust that the messages are from him  I have to meet bordy in real life and get him to say (this) my public key, otherwise any other source of the public key is suspect. now if I want to send a message to bordy that I only want him to read, I encrypt the message with bordy's public key, which allows only bordy's private key to decrypt, this is because public key and private key are created in such a way during key pair generation. so if bordy wants to send us all an encrypted message he has to encrypt one copy of the message with my public key then send it to me, encrypt another copy of the message with oh say Martin's public key then send it to him, etc. Most of you are probably thinking thats very tedious, well it just so happens that Thunderbird+enigmail solves this problem beautifully, just install thunderbird and then the enigmail extensions from the repositories. Create a new Key pair (or just have enigmail auto detect the existing key in .gpg) and then swap your public keys and start sending messages. this is just a basic explanation and I've not covered things like levels of trust, and sharing public key repositories with other people, and things like just making sure that the message is from a particular person (as in if I have bordy's public key he cans 'sign' a message with his private key, then send it to me,  and I can ensure that the message was not tampered with at all using his public key, keep in mind this gives no encryption protection simply assures me that the message I received was sent using bordy's private key.) Consult wikipedia or <a href="http://wiki.ubuntu.com">wiki.ubuntu.com</a> for more info. or hit me up on irc for more info - Eldo -- Ubuntu-us-fl mailing list <a href="mailto:Ubuntu-us-fl@lists.ubuntu.com">Ubuntu-us-fl@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-fl"> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-us-fl</a> </blockquote></div> -- Christopher Rohde <a href="http://veritastic.net">http://veritastic.net</a>      w:   863-686-8900      c:   863-885-1229