Changing GPG's default key type?

[Robert J. Hansen]

> The patent for RSA has now been expired for a few
> years (since 2003)

The patent never expired.  It was due to expire in September 2000; in  
August 2000 the patentholders released it into the public domain.   
Some people (myself included) think they did this in order to prevent  
the media coverage of patent-expiration celebrations.  I was really  
looking forward to the party Network Associates (then the owner of  
PGP) was throwing, and then got cancelled.

> Only people using rather old versions of GnuPG or PGP (from 1997-2000)
> will have any trouble with RSA keys. If they use GnuPG, they can
> install a plug-in that will enable RSA for them. I don't know if a
> similar option is available for PGP.

No; only people using OpenPGP applications that don't support RSA will  
have problems.  This is potentially quite a lot of people.  The last  
time I tallied it up there were at least ten different OpenPGP  
implementations, and some of them only support the bare minimum  
required.