Silk Road forums

Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: Bennett4545 on June 05, 2013, 01:02 pm

Title: Free tip for using GPG tools on a Mac
Post by: Bennett4545 on June 05, 2013, 01:02 pm
Trying to get my 50 posts without spamming.

I had some trouble getting GPG tools up and running on my mac.  I wanted to share some tips for people stumbling through it like me.

Once you install GPG tools, these isn't any program you have to have running.  The "GPG Keychain Access" in your applications folder is really only used once to set up your private and public keys.  Once you have those, importing others' public keys can be done in the background using the right-click method. 

forget about email or email addresses.  You probably won't won't be using email to send PGP messages for silk road purposes.  You can, and should, use a fake email address for your personal public and private key.  Don't worry about using GPG Mail, tormail, or anything like that for basic ordering. 

The best part of GPG tools are the Mac "services" it installs that are accessible from within almost any program.  If you do it right, you can "right click" (or control-click) highlight text from within a web browser, or most any application, and import a key or encrypt a message. 

The trick is that you need to go the "System Preferences", then go to "Keyboard" then select the tab for "Keyboard Shortcuts". Look on the left column for "services", select that and then make sure that every OpenPGP service has a check box next to it.  (For some reason, OpenPGP does not activate all of its services by default).  You will see all of these services when you right-click text. 

If you are using the TorBundle, the right-click services do not work for some reason.  However, you can still find the "services" under the "TorBrowser" menu item at the top left of your screen.

Good luck on the road.