Self-Introduction: Timothy Murphy

[Timothy Murphy]

On Thursday 20 December 2007 05:27:31 am Murray McAllister wrote:

> Hi Tim,
>
> Thanks for joining. I'm glad you got your keys sorted out. That was
> almost correct, but you do not need the 0x pre-pended (so it would be
> 1381C1A4F). Out of curiosity, where did you find that information
> (0x)?

I've been experimenting with pgp a little,
and it seems to me that pgp.mit.edu _does_ expect 0x to precede the key.

I've looked again at
<http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/UsingGpg/CreatingKeys>,
and in my view the advice given there is not the best.

What for instance do the lines
------------------------------------------------------
gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --send-key KEYNAME

For KEYNAME, substitute the key ID of your primary keypair.
------------------------------------------------------
actually mean?
Why not just give an example instead of this abstract terminology.

Assuming the "key ID" means something like "D575F650"
then the advice in my experience does not work.

I believe a far better procedure is to create a key-pair on one's computer
(I use kgpg) and an ascii version of this 
(in kgpg with Keys=>Export public keys).
Then go to <http://pgp.mit.edu>
and enter the ascii version there.
When this has completed, check that the key is entered
by trying something like 0xD575F650 .
(You can enter the longer version -
0xC9010A47299E1F3A643D8AB2C9C110DFD575F650
- in my case, but you must, as far as I can see,
precede the hexadecimal in all cases with 0x.)

In my experience, it is much easier to do things like this
as directly as possible,
rather than using "clever" procedures that are meant to make it quicker.
After all, one is not likely to be creating key-pairs every day.