Here’s an idea: rather than sending advertisements to user’s computers, why not send scripting code to calculate [the valuable thing, like, I dunno, pi or hacking the encryption on HDDVD or something] and send the results back to your central computer?
Come on, you know you want to. And it’s free!
A while back I was given the task of setting up encryption for sending files around. Ooh. Sounds tricky, I thought. I’ve seen PGP signatures on privacy freaks’ e-mail for years now, but it all seemed a bit like black magic. I had no idea how it worked.
I went looking, and it turns out it’s not really particularly difficult to figure out or get working. But I had to wade through a few hefty (in web terms) manuals to find all the info I needed. I never really found a web page which detailed the basics in an easy to digest format. This could be that page.
PGP is Pretty Good Privacy, invented by Phil Zimmerman and now run by the PGP Corporation. It’s the defacto standard for this kind of stuff. It’s fairly secure, and has the added benefit of compressing text quite well. PGP sell a number of solutions, but if you’re wondering about freebies, then…
GPG is Gnu Privacy Guard, which is the free implementation of (most of) PGP. It lives here: www.gnupg.org.
Encryption of this type is all about keys. If you haven’t grasped the key concept before, here it is in brief: a recipient has a public and a private key. The public key is given to anybody. Senders encrypt stuff using the public key. Only the recipient has the private key, and uses this to decrypt stuff. Obviously if communication is two-way, you need multiple public and private keys. Okay? Easy.
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