Due to popular demand, and what I hope will result as good contributions to the further development of sks-keyservers.net I decided to release the sourcecode under the GNU General Public License v3 in a subversion repository available at code.google.com
For those who haven't gotten to know this project, yet, I started it in 2006 when the former random.sks.keyserver.penguin.de round-robin pool by Bjoern Buerger went offline. The SKS Keyservers provide the public key component / certificates in the Web of Trust of which OpenPGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") is based on. The whole framework is used in order to facilitate digitally signed and encrypted email messages.
In an environment where the governments implement schemes such as the Data Retention Directive (EU), and documentation shows that US used its Echelon surveillance network to promote Boeing's business (in 1994), one can't stress the importance of encryption enough. But even for those who don't feel this need, email is becoming an increasingly important method of communication - and without digital signatures, anyone can spoof an email address. Despite this, surprisingly few have decided to invest any time or effort into securing their digital communication.
That was also the reason for me starting to write my still un-published book in 2008, Sending Emails The Safe Way. I started this with the intention of convincing more people about the necessity and teaching them about the various elements related to proper security. The more I wrote, however, I noticed that my writing got more technical and in the end I concluded that the book was not suitable for the intended task, but was rather aimed at system administrators. Realizing this I never got around to finished the book. However, the parts I wrote during a couple very interesting weeks can nevertheless be downloaded in PDF format. By now all but the cryptography theory and history is outdated, including quite a few of the references found in the footnotes, so any new effort at writing something on the subject would be from scratch. Based on the adoption rate of the technology, it sure seems necessary.
