I forget if your name is on any patents.
My name is on the exponential key exchange patent (4,200,770). I wasn't much involved in the filing process and the for all that it pays me royalties and is of commercial significance, I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. I can believe someone might write an entertaining article called the ``The Public Key Patent Squabble,'' but I have no interest at all in doing so. What exactly do you think I should have included?
I understand that the NSA tried to deny the RSA patent . . . Do you know anything about what I'm talking about?
No. But after all, the RSA patent was filed from MIT by people (R, S, and A) that I didn't know well till much later. There may have been some hankey pankey I didn't know about, but I certainly don't recall the New York Times article you refer to. The statement that ``They just got the application back rejected.'' Doesn't sound right to me. I presume that the Patent Office has to state why an application is returned. It's decisions, after all, are a constant subject of litigation and it must have to be very careful about following its own procedures. There was an interference between the RSA patent and the Pohlig-Hellman patent, which is the reason RSA didn't issue till '83.
I'm very concerned about some anomalies on the cypherpunk list. Are you on it?
Yes. Is that irregular or are you referring to something I haven't noticed?
In particular some messages you may have traded with T.C. May have shown up lately and I'm a bit suspicious of some irregularities.
That's because, as discussed one of Tim's messages yesterday, I normally send comments only to the people who posted and leave it to them to repost to the whole list if they think what I said is worthwhile. Like Tim, I have noticed that the list is cluttered with multiple responses to the same question. Whit