Nathaniel seems to be defending his cause sufficiently well, and graciously answering the abuse. Some of the abusers are showing a fairly comprehensive lack of knowledge of the FV system. I would venture to say that FV has no more profit motivation than, say, Netscape--or how about Open Market? They who gleefully opened a "Here are the secure servers that haven't been hacked" page some time ago. That was pretty self- serving, wasn't it? Nor would I consider the FV brouhaha much more obvious than, say, the front page announcements about "NFS and RPC considered dangerous" that hit the big papers last year. The weaknesses of those protocols for internetworking have long been known to those working with TCP/IP. Now, clearly there are lots of opinions on FV's system, but if people like Sameer and Rich Salz (e.g., who have reputations as knowledgeable and aware) are going to trash FV it would mean a lot more to many readers if they could state more specifically what it is about FV that doesn't work (or that doesn't work as well as, say, SSL or CyberCash or Open Market's approaches). As for the Weld Pond/et al graphical clicking approaches, they may work and they may defend against some attacks, but I won't use it (too much clicking around, too likely to make mistakes) and neither will anyone without a GUI. My $0.02. -Pete Loshin pete@loshin.com Ted Anderson wrote:
I am rather shocked that after wading through hundreds of msgs of abuse of Nathaniel and FV I haven't seen one message of support; but perhaps I missed it.
etc.