Kipp E.B. Hickman says:
I'm sorry you are so upset. :-(
IPSP was not in my vocabulary at the time of the first posting. Ignorance was briefly bliss :^)
My complaint about Netscape is that you guys haven't been reading about what others have done. I understand your desire to get things done quickly, but you are making assumptions about whats out there and what works that aren't warranted.
However, regardless of whether or not extant hardware is reusable, there is still the not so small matter of software. Software for PC's, MAC's and a host of UNIX machines before a workable secure network can be constructed.
Certainly. SSL would also require software for all those platforms -- its no different in this regard.
Finally, I never said that "SSL is better than anything out there". I don't know who did. All I said is that "SSL is something", which isn't really saying much. SSL is A solution to A set of problems, namely privacy and authentication.
Privacy and authentication are also provided by IPSP. However, IPSP provides all sorts of advantages -- immunity from traffic analysis, no requirement to change the way an application operates to start using it, protection of the entire IP stack (not just TCP sockets), very minimal changes required to applications that want to use the information provided by the IPSP layer for authentication (and no need to change your read or write calls or anything), etc, etc, etc. Perry