It's nice to see some technical discussion for a change. I guess one reason transport layer security seems irrelevant to Cypherpunks is that it isn't secure. Not necessarily from a cryptographic point of view, but in its procedure. For example, the Digital Telephony Bill avoided acting against Internet providers _this_ time. Being provided by the carrier, transport-layer security is succeptable to LEA arm-twisting. It may be so even now despite DT's current form. Such sabotaging of end-to-end security is much tougher, if not impossible, and with end-to-end security, transport security is redundant and possibly a painful overhead. (This is quite apart from the other hassles - proxies need to be changed etc - which only exist with transport security.) As for James Donald's criticism of the IETF for not extending HTML to support end-to-end security, well, MIME already exists. "We know everything about you that we need to know" - Coleta Brueck, IRS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab@dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab@arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA