PGP is not needed any more
PGP is old and not really needed any more
Where the belief comes from
Interfaces improved. Platforms encrypt messages themselves, addresses get displayed in tidy panels, and the manual steps that used to be unavoidable are now optional in most flows. It genuinely feels like the awkward part was solved.
What improved is convenience inside a session. The question a signature answers sits before the session starts, and nothing about a nicer interface touches it. A convincing clone has the same tidy panels, because it copied them.
What a signature establishes
Exactly two things, and they are narrow and absolute. That whoever produced it held a specific private key, and that the signed text is unchanged by a single character. There is no partial credit and nothing probabilistic. Chained to a fingerprint you established independently, that answers whether you are where you think you are.
No other tool available to you answers that question at all. Not the address looking right, not the page loading, not the interface matching your memory, not the source you got it from. That is why the claim fails: something cannot be obsolete when nothing has replaced its function.
The four outcomes worth knowing
| Result | Meaning |
|---|---|
| BAD signature | Text altered or signature fabricated. Unambiguous, and the response is to leave. |
| No public key | Signed by a key you do not hold. A gap in your keyring, not a verdict on the message. |
| GOOD, unexpected key | The maths works against a key that is not yours. Dangerous, because the word GOOD appears. |
| GOOD, old date | Verifies, but the statement is months old. Signatures never expire, so genuine old ones get replayed. |
The real objection
That it is inconvenient. That is fair and it is a different claim from being unnecessary. The honest answer is that the inconvenient part happens once, when you establish a fingerprint carefully from several independent sources, and every check afterwards is mechanical and takes under a minute. That ratio is the whole argument, and the reason people skip it is that the setup produces no visible result at the time you do it. See verifying.