On Thu, 28 Mar 1996, Eric Young wrote:
On Wed, 27 Mar 1996, Phil Karlton wrote:
My apologies for misunderstanding what you wrote. It could be that I am oversensitive on the issue since SSL has been "accused" of being proprietary in many forums.
A lot of the aura of "proprietariness" of SSL comes from the early history, which I don't think we need to go into again.
ASN.1 BOOLEAN type, and I have only just been able to get hold of the actual full specification of X509v3. The UNIVERSALSTRING type? Only found out about it's existance 3 days ago.
DER BOOLEAN : [UNIVERSAL 1] true - 0x01 0x01 0xff false- 0x01 0x01 0x00 I never had any problem getting hold of ASN.1 information for free (I even managed to get a change into the PER spec without being a government). Marshall Rose's "The Open Book" really helped. protectzia rules, even if Tim doesn't know what it means :) Mind you, when I was working on z39.50 I had tremendous fun working on debugging when just about everybody had hand-rolled their own compilers or codecs, and nobody actually had a real copy of the ASN.1 specs The real problem with asn.1 is that it is so easily abused; unless you stop and think about what the spec you're writing is going to look like in terms of structs and bits on the wire it's way too easy to come up with something completely unimplementable. When used correctly it can be a life saver, and when used with PER, the encodings generated are often way better than you'ld end up with if you designed the encodings manually, especially for modern cache architectures; however if the spec is fucked up there's not a lot you can do. Hmm - hi abuse potential - now there's something that really needs federal regulation. Simon