I agree with Sameer's points here. Netscape carries with it the potential of revitalizing the cypherpunks agenda, but also, in the worst case, making it irrelevant. What happens, I think, depends on what we do. On the plus side, Netscape 2.0 will, without a doubt, be the first usable mail tool to incorporate real encryption. It may accomplish, almost overnight, the long-held goal of making a nontrivial fraction of Internet email secure. Another potentially big win is the Java language. It seems to me that it will be quite plausible to code up real crypto applications in this language. Once coded, these applications will run on every important platform in the universe, and can be accessible by the click of a mouse. Perl-RSA was a sign of what's possible in the non-C world. One caveat is the slowdown from the interpreted code (roughly a factor of 25). The best way to look at this is as a challenge, to use clever coding tricks and intelligent architectures, including caching. The speed of Java implementations will inevitably improve - in fact, I might just be doing my PhD thesis on memory management in Java. One potential downside, as Sameer points out, is the X.509 certification hierarchy. This ancient beast has the potential to defeat many of the cypherpunk aims, most especially the possiblity of anonymous communication. However, that's not a foregone conclusion. The most important thing to be doing right now is to _understand_ what's happening. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be reading the S/MIME and X.509 documentation, poring over reference code, and (of course) playing with Netscape 2.0 myself. We're much more likely to get our agenda implemented if we are armed with a good understanding. There are lots of ways around X.509 - maybe we can work our way around it, maybe we can adapt it to our needs, maybe we can come up with something better and get it replaced. Whatever the case may be, we should not give up hope. Netscape is one manifestation of the ancient Chinese curse: may we live in interesting times! Raph