(I'll only respond to the points Matthew Ghil made about Crypto Toolkits and such, not to his reactions to my laundry lists of projects and code.)
Your point about the Crypto Toolkit is well-taken, especially in light of your comment about Mathematica. We need some sort of universal interface that everyone can use, that is easy to understand, and have it be able to work with different mail packages and different systems.
Understand that I'm in no way suggesting Mathematica syntax for these functions and modules (though there are certainly worse choices....). But what the developers of Mathematica (henceforth MMA) did was to provide functional tools for scientists and casual programmers (and nonprogrammers) that did not require them to know C or to accumulate their own C and FORTRAN libraries. MMA mainly is a collection of more than 1200 functions, with user-defined funtions acting as keywords. The market success of MMA (courses at most schools, about 20 books, a journal, etc.), and its cousin Maple (a competitor actually, but also a cousin), not to mention MathCAD, shows a market exists for higher-level language tools. (However, MMA and Maple and other such products are _environments_ requiring the product to run, with sometimes cumbersome means of hooking to outside code and resources. This rules these out for most users, who don't have MMA or SmalltalkAgents or the like. Still, there's _some_ chance that such tools could be used for building standalone apps. But I would have to agree with any criticisms that Unix and C and such are more available--now.) There's little doubt that C is more efficient, blah blah. But the success in using Perl to write the remailer scripts in shows that efficiency is not always the only concern. A lot more to be said on this whole issue. I'm not sure everyone here is interested, though. And I detect some impatience with the very idea that these things need discussing....the idea that "Cypherpunks write code" seems to be interpreted by some that what we should all do is just to sit down and start pounding out C code. (A good idea, of course. For those with the skills and the time. But implementing something other than another cipher, such as we've seen several of here, is *conceptually nontrivial*. For example, suppose a DC-Net is desired as the target. Several efforts have started, but none has reported any significant progress. Most of the efforts seem stillborn. There are reasons for this, I think. The old "semantic gap" between the descriptions in papers (themselves often incomplete or confusing) and the tools available. I shudder to think at the difficulties in writing C code from scratch to implement even a crude DC-Net, absent crypto primitives like bit commitment (the idea of choosing a bit then not being able to change it....done cryptographically, of course) and the other "tools" that are assumed in a real-world system but which are nonexistent in C.)
Maybe we need some kind of new interpreted (for universal portability) data-manipulations language, so we can write crypto tools and everyone could use them on every platform. Or maybe we just need to write a
In line with PostScript and its newer cousin Telescript, I jokingly suggested to Peter Wayner in a recent message that a crypto version of such a crypto-protocol-oriented language be called "CryptScript." The idea being that of a collection of tools and utilities, unified in a language that can more seamlessly incorporate the current concepts and protocols of modern cryptography. (Telescript itself looks intriguing.) As I said in a private message to Hal Finney, I'm not at all trying to set or focus the agenda of others. Rather, I'm just trying to focus my own agenda through discussion. If others get something out of this discussion, great. If they don't, at least discussion of crypto protocols and integration with languages and tools is no more off-topic than most discussions here. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."