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Scott Junner
Everyone deserves privacy, whether or not their doing anything secret.
Sending secret messages SOUNDS like it's going to be hard. But you don't have to be Edward Snowden or Julian Assange to secret away encrypted messages to Friends, Family and Colleagues. The truth is, all the hard work has been done for you.
Along side that, you need to know how to make sure you're talking to the right person. What if you just told an impersonator all your dark secrets. Whoops!
So this monthly Free Software Melbourne Meetup is going to be a workshop about two things. How you can very easily send secret messages NO ONE else can read except you and your intended recipient.
And how to protect yourself from rogue agents trying to intercept your digital privacy.
It's surprisingly easy to gain quick competency in email Ninjitsu. You just need to learn a few simple commands and hey presto, even the worlds elite security and intelligence agencies are going to have a seriously hard time figuring out what you and your confidant are saying to each other, and you'll be able to see bad guys coming a mile off.
In this workshop we're not going to rush, we're going to take our time, and even order in pizza so we have nowhere else to be.
Our very own Ben Finney is going to introduce us to a piece of software called GnuPG (free implementation of OpenPGP) which can be easily installed (and probably already is) on any Linux Distro, Mac or Microsoft machine. And then walk us through the steps of how to create secret and not so secret keys and then use them to lock up a message and unlock it at the other end.
Actually, we'll be working through the
Email Self Defence course created by Free Software Foundation. So if you can't make it, there's still a way for you to follow along at home in your own time. But doing it with a room full of people gives you a couple of huge benefits.
- There's people to help immediately if you stumble into problems
- You can start to swap public keys in person to help build the web of trust (and learn what that means).