Teaching my privacy class about encryption provides a good reason to update my own encryption setup -- and it's nice to see that user-friendly encryption on the desktop has proceeded quite a bit.

First, replace an expired PGP (GnuPG) keypair, gpg --gen-key, and submit the new public key, fingerprint 456CAD51, to keyservers.

Plugins for Eudora never worked particularly well, so I'd been using gnupg on the command line, and not so frequently as I'd have liked. The Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird brings pushbutton email encryption and signature.

Finally, the self-signed SSL certificate for seltzer.org needed renewal (and its CA had moved from San Francisco to New York). Another 5 minutes and that was back up.

Maybe social norms and unease-of-use don't deter the use of encryption so much as they once did.