Anonymous said:
The major problem that holds back the development of FreeS/WAN is with its management. [Management that cares more about sitting on its pulpit, than getting useful software into the hands of people.] Unless things have changed recently, they still won't accept contributions from the US. This makes no sense. GPG is shipping with every Linux distribution I know of, and the German's take contributions from the US.
(From the pulpit:) Once we kick John Asscroft's unconstitutional ash outta town, bush George Bust along with more than a thousand other innocents, and eliminate the spectre of Judd Gregg and other retrograde stalinists 're-regulating' US crypto, then we'll think about polluting the precious bodily fluids of worldwide freeware privacy protection with the stench of US crypto policy. It probably won't happen for a few months. Or hadn't you noticed that the US government is not in much of a mood to follow the constitution or to tolerate dissent or privacy among the sleepy sheeplike citizens? They're doing their best to stamp that radical stuff out right here in the USSA, let alone let it cross the border into parts of the world that they don't have firmly under their thumb. Less than 100% support for every paranoid and senseless twitch of the current Administration is a demonstration not not only of treason but of active support for terrorism, which everyone knows is a terrible thing except when the US or Israel or Great Britain does it. Anybody reading this mailing list is already gonna be first up against the wall once the joy of arresting immigrant movers as 'terrorists' fades, and spying on 'domestic political groups' become fair game. Your packets are already in the lint screen on that big, big vacuum cleaner. And our new policy of maximum sentences for trivial 'crimes', like forgetting to file some form, reduces the expense and bother of actually trying suspects for the crimes that the agencies suspect them of. Of course you can confront your accusers! Did you or did you not jaywalk across Route 1 last July, Mr. May?
The primary kernel developers have been willing to integrate crypto into the kernel since the crypto regs were lowered. It's the policy of no US contributions that's holding back Linux IPSEC.
The reason I started the IPSEC-for-Linux project those many years ago was because Linux kernel releases used to be built in free countries, unlike the releases of most other operating systems. Now they aren't. Oops. Perhaps mr. or ms. 'anonymous' and the primary kernel developers didn't spend seven years making a principled tilt at the windmill of NSA's export controls. We overturned them by a pretty thin margin. The government managed to maneuver such that no binding precedents were set: if they unilaterally change the regulations tomorrow to block the export of public domain crypto, they wouldn't be violating any court orders or any judicial decisions. I.e. they are not BOUND by the policy change. They changed it "voluntarily", in order to sneak out of the court cases by the back door. Even today it is sometimes said that once Dan Bernstein ends his court case (which still continues today), the NSA is ready, willing, and able to slap the controls right back on. And it would take months or years in court -- and lots more volunteer citizen money spent for freedom, while the bastards spend tax money to lock us up -- to get the controls removed again. If the judges haven't changed their minds in the meantime. (You may have noticed that last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals accpted Judge Kaplan's half-lies-half-truth judgment 3-0 in the 2600 case appeal: Yes, absolutely, software is First Amendment protected speech. But no, somehow the First Amendment really doesn't mean what it means elsewhere; of *course* they can regulate the publication of software on flimsy grounds. Like that sometime later, somebody somewhere might potentially be somewhat hurt by something somebody else does with the software, if we don't eliminate that option by restricting the publication of that software now. Suppose the next crypto export court case happens in NY rather than CA? EFF would be proud to defend John Young and Perry Metzger, but all its lawyers might be in prison, charged by John Asscroft with "aiding terrorists by eroding our national unity and diminishing our resolve".)
IMHO: If Freeswan had never been created, an alternate, more mature implementation would already exist in the mainline Linux kernel.
Make my day. John Gilmore PS: Of course, the only software worth wasting your time on comes from those macho dudes of the U.S. of A. Those furriners don't even know how to speek the lingua proper, let alone write solid buggy code like Microsoft. High crypto math is all Greek to them. It's just lucky for Linus that he moved to the US, otherwise we'd all know his furrin software was crap too, even tho he tricked us by cloning it from Bell Labs.