At 7:13 pm -0400 10/3/96, Timothy C. May wrote:
GAK, or Girlfriend's Access to Keys, is indeed a very scary thing.
Ah. Maybe we should cross-post this to alt.tasteless?
"Macintosh, the Surveillance System for the Rest of Us."
(Why Apple would go along with this, while Microsoft and Netscape are apparently not playing ball, is incomprehensible to me. Apple risks alienating its remaining core user base, who often characterize Microsoft as "the Borg." So, Apple capitulates, while MS does not. I guess the "Macintosh Crypto Forum" didn't do a lot of good, did it?)
Ouch. My first reaction to the above was to say, "Oh, Yeah??? Well, you're ugly, buddy, and your mother dresses you funny, too!" But, I won't upset the decorum of so august a forum with such eggregious classlessness. Not here on cypherpunks. :-). If one were to be completely uncharitable in the interpretation of Tim's most recent outbreak of vitriol here, it would seem that he's offended that he wasn't asked first to be the keynote at MacCrypto, the conference a bunch of us had at Apple a month ago, which, I might add, was a considerable success. Of course, the real irony here is that Tim *was* the first person we asked to keynote. The irony compounds itself slightly more when you consider the *last* person who we asked, Phil Zimmermann, at the *last* possible minute, graciously accepted our invitation and delivered his keynote speech to a very enthusiastic crowd. Unfortunately, it may be a speaking engagement Phil regrets now, in light of Apple's apparent participation in the most recent Washington GAK-fest. :-{. Anyway, let us *be* charitable, and take Tim's apparent vituperation about Apple's complete capitulation to government pressure, not to mention the appalling failure of the MacCrypto conference to lob any clues over the walls of Fortress Apple, entirely at their face value, shall we? Let's assume that he really *wasn't* trying to rattle the bars on the Mac crypto community's collective cage, and that he actually was trying to contribute something constructive to what appears to be a *truly* apalling situation to anyone who wants strong crypto, and thus internet commerce, to be transparent and easy to do on the Macintosh. The Mac crypto community's cage is plenty rattled by the recent news from Washington, as it is. With that in mind, the best thing most of us can figure is that Ellen Hancock, Apple's chief technology officer, freshly hired from IBM, is in the process of pulling the same kind of crypto-boner for Apple that Netscape's CEO did last year about this time. Frankly, people who run industrial organizations like Apple, and, I might add, Microsoft, don't really understand yet that internet commerce *is* financial cryptography, and, of course, that means strong, and un-GAKked, crypto. I'm sure that the people on the mac-crypto list and the rest of the Mac internet community in general will disabuse her of this notion rather quickly. By the way, most of the hard core of 70 or so people who came to the MacCrypto conference, those who sat through the whole thing from start to finish, were from outside Apple. Clearly, as far as crypto on the Mac goes, the word "evangelism" cuts both ways. However, we got some very good stuff from the Apple folks who did come, including a soon to be released entropy manager -- with public source code -- and a public-key "keychain" project -- with public source code -- , and a volunteer of development participation in serious crypto projects from an Apple fellow (who, by definition, can do anything he wants) and his staff. Frankly, I'd rather see actual code being written than press releases, wouldn't you, Tim? Even if the code isn't on an Intel Pentium Pro 200 using the Microsoft CryptoAPI... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "'Bart Bucks' are not legal tender." -- Punishment, 100 times on a chalkboard, for Bart Simpson The e$ Home Page: http://www.vmeng.com/rah/