Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) was developed by Phil Zimmerman in 1991 to enable secure exchange of documents and email. Security is based on standard cryptography and a “web of trust.” PGP was freely distributed, and used by many. An Internet standard for email using PGP is specified in RFC 2015 “MIME Security with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP).”

I had not used PGP for many years, and was recently asked to use it for secure document interchange. The availability of PGP to support email seems dated and limited. I was unable to find a free GUI implementation for Windows XP. This suggests a decreasing level of interest in this PGP use with email.

Commercial PGP is available from PGP Corp. The underlying technology is alive and well, but it is focused to provide solutions for desktop and disk encryption.

… Steve Kille

We are about to achieve virtual immortality.

Recently, Lazare Ponticelli, 110 years old, died. He was the last French infantryman left alive from the First World War. With him died the final traces of the rich and complex world of his comrades in the trenches, of his parents, and the vast majority of the stuff of his early life.

As The Economist’s obituary beautifully put it: The business of memory is as elusive as water or mist. The yellowing photographs slide to the back of the drawer; the voices fade; and the last rememberers of the dead die in their turn, leaving only what Thomas Hardy called “oblivion’s swallowing sea”.

But things are different now. We are all accreting ever-richer electronic traces of ourselves. Today, our emails are kept for many years. Soon, many of our voice conversations will be archived, and our instant messaging conversations, our teamspace participations, our pictures, our videos, and any sort of electronic stuff you can think of.

And so, in times ahead, when our last rememberer dies, we will still live on, through the medium of computer archives. Amazingly, it will be possible for our successors, many generations hence, to become intimate with us as people, to feel the texture of our lives: from our important decisions, to our most harmless of foibles.

… David Ferris

We’ve just been learning about Lexbe’s hosted litigation support. In brief:

• Does document review and case analysis. Documents can be in PDF, native email, and MS Office formats, or 100 other formats.
• Shared case research, case calendars, and other tools.
• Interestingly, users can build timeline charts/dynamic chronologies; they’re automatically maintained.
• Searches can be enlarged via Thesaurus.
• Access is via Web interface.
• Workflows allow for involvement by the client law firm itself as well as its clients.
• Main focus is to sell to smaller and medium-sized law firms.
• Priced by case and by amount of storage used. Starts at $79/month for one case and 100MB of ESI.
• Early stages venture; the company has been going a year. Ferris Research estimates current revenue rate as perhaps $1 million/year.

… David Ferris