Gnupg-users Digest, Vol 184, Issue 22

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Mon Feb 4 05:38:35 CET 2019


> Well, i can only say last time i used PGPfone was in 2014, with a friend.
> We both used a website that showed us our IP addresses and it worked
> fine. We only had to set UDP port 17447 in our routers, for incoming
> and outgoing connections.

"All you had to do" was:

(a) understand computer networking well enough to understand what you
needed to do,

(b) know your router could be used to do port forwarding,

(c) log into your router, navigate bad UX,

(d) probably switch your DHCP allocation to a static one, so you
wouldn't have to do this again every time you acquired a new DHCP lease,

(e) and on and on and on.

No, PGPfone was not "easier to use".  The skills required to use it were
far in excess of what most users possessed.

I get that you liked PGPfone.  Nothing wrong with that.  But there are
good reasons it failed to get traction in the privacy community, most of
them revolving around user-unfriendliness and inconvenience.



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