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+# GPG Is Pretty Cool
+
+The GPG software suite is a pretty elegant cryptosystem. It provides:
+
+* A standard, well-maintained set of tools for creating and storing keys, and
+  associating them with identities
+
+* A suite of reliable tools for encrypting, signing, decrypting, and
+  verifying data that can be easily assembled into any combination of
+  integrity checks, authenticity checks, and privacy management
+
+* A key distribution network that does not rely on hierarchal authority and
+  that can be bootstrapped from scratch quickly and easily
+
+While GPG [sucks in a number of important ways](terrible), it's also the best
+tool we have right now for restoring privacy to private correspondance over
+the internet.
+
+## Code Signing
+
+Pretty much every Linux distribution relies on GPG for code signing. Rather
+than using GPG's web-of-trust model for key distribution, however, code
+signing with GPG usually creates a hierarchal PKI so that the root keys can
+be shipped with the operating system.
+
+This works shockingly well, and support for GPG is extremely well integrated
+into common package management systems such as apt and yum.
+
+## Source Control
+
+Which is basically code signing, admittedly, but even Git's support for GPG
+is basically great. Tools like Fossil embed it even deeper, and work quite
+well.
+
+## Email
+
+GPG's integration with email is surprisingly clever, follows a number of
+long-standing best practices for extending email, and does a _very_ good job
+of providing some guarantees that make sense in a not-terribly-long-ago view
+of email as a communications medium. In particular, if
+
+* who you talk to is not a secret, and
+* what, broadly, you are talking about is not a secret, but
+* the specifics of the discussion _are_ a secret, and
+* all participants are using GPG on their own mailers
+
+then GPG works brilliantly and modern GPG integration is very effective.
+
+These assumptions pretty accurately reflect the majority of email use up
+through the late 90s and early 2000s: technical or personal correspondence
+between known acquaintences.
+
+The internet has moved on from email for casual correspondence, but that
+doesn't invalidate the elegance of GPG's integration for GPG users.
+
+## Distributed Verification
+
+Even though GPG's trust model has some serious privacy costs and concerns, it
+works as a great proof of concept for CA-free identity management. That's
+huge: centralized CAs have even more onerous costs and worse risks than GPG's
+trust network, while offering less transparency to help offset those costs.
+
+Others have written some pretty interesting things on how to improve GPG's
+trust model and make it less succeptible to errors or key leaks by
+small-to-middling numbers of participants. [This
+post](https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2013-September/030235.html)
+to tor-talk last year is probably the most complete.