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That's fantastic! Someday, I'll have to get a Ham radio license. I'm not in the most ideal position to do it at this moment, but I want to. When I do I'll have to see about building my own amplifier and my own equipment, since taking the DIY approach would be boss! Not sure if I would save any money by taking the homebrew route but it would be cool to do nonetheless. I think I would need to figure out where I could set up an antenna.
As for crypto, get ready for a bit of an infodump, I'll leave a bit of a primer below!
4 - Yeah, the main thing I realized is that the average fanfiction writer is probably at that awkward, transitory stage in their lives. As bad as the stuff they might churn out might be, it doesn't make me feel any better about myself picking on them, especially when making the mistakes you make the first time around as a writer and knowing and recognizing your old shames are what makes you grow up as a writer and improve. It's important to know when to deflate an ego and knock someone down a peg, but I don't feel right doing it to a thirteen year old behind their back and while anonymous, especially if it's in a fashion that could be construed as being mean-spirited. So that's probably why I'll be doing it to my own fanfiction, or writing my own grade of parody bad fanfiction. I can just imagine what my characters' reaction would be to getting stuck in a story full of extremely dated pepperjack, and going "This author likes plugging Will Smith? What is this, 1996? Someone shoot me before The Backstreet Boys show up."
5 - That's a pretty good idea, I very much like the idea of being positive. It's too easy on the Internet to be negative all the time and just spiral down into this cycle of hatred. That's not quite my style, so talking about what you liked rather than what you didn't is a great idea!
And now for the infodump...
PGP is one of the older and more feature-rich public key infrastructure systems, invented during the 1990s. A lot of people are familiar with using it for E-mail, but it's more than that. It is a system of public key infrastructure, so one key (the public key) encrypts and verifies, but it takes a different key (the private key) to decrypt and sign. You to put the public key in a place where everyone can get it, so they can encrypt to you or verify stuff that you've cryptographically signed with your private key, but as long as only you have the private key, only you can ever sign or decrypt. This way, for instance, I don't have to go all the way across the internet to deliver a shared key or a password to you, as long as you know that the key belongs to me. To help you with that, each key has a unique identifier, called a 'fingerprint' that can't be forged and is unique to that key. The rationale would be that you would hold a key signing party, and then get your friends to meet you, and both you and all your friends confirm that the key fingerprint belongs to you. This prevents what's called a 'man in the middle' attack by an active attacker giving a fake key in place of the real ones, then impersonating both sides of a conversation to each other. Some people like to certify each other by building a network of verified people that they know and trust, and can personally visit in person as a defense against this, but I personally don't suggest doing this.
A signature, or the "begin signed message" at the top and the jumble of seemingly random letters at the bottom is a code that can be verified to have only have been generated by my key. Should someone attempt to modify the message within "signed message" and "end signature" then what will likely happen is the verification will display "Bad Signature" or display an error. If that happens, then you will know immediately that someone has tried to tamper with my message. Since we haven't been able to undeniably attribute the key to me, if you were to download my public key and attempt to verify any of my messages, you'll probably get "Not Verified" or "Not Trusted" since at this moment there's no way for you to personally attribute the key to me and will have to take my word on faith: for now, we will have to trust-on-first-use. If my keys ever change in a way where the new key is not certified by the old one you'll know they've been forged and you're talking to someone posing as me, or someone is tampering with this website. Something like that would be very easily done, as the board has no Secure Socket Layering/Transport Layer Security.
If you're interested in taking the plunge, I could walk you through some of the functions - GnuPG is very complex and unintuitive (that's probably why it's never really seen widespread use in the 20+ years it's been around), so it does help if you have someone to help. The problem with it is that it was designed in an era when sheer power and features for users was seen as a selling point, and usability, including intuitivity, ability to be easily used, and tolerance to human error was never seen as important. We know now that back then everyone had their priorities backward, I guess hindsight is 20/20.
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