While I'd never disagree with my good buddy Tim, let me tell you all about the neatest medial hack since anesthesia, TMS, or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation! This astounding use of magnetic fields can stimulate or deaden nerves through the skull! Its being used right now in research hospitals to create functional mappings of the human brain! An experiment I witnessed involved a volunteer who had his cold nerves turned off by placing a small probe over his head. He was completely unable to feel the cold of an ice cube placed on his bare skin! Snake oil? No. Its really out there, and is has real possibilites. But how is the lay person to tell? With a car, you can see if it turns on. With a replacement for anesthetics, you can decide if it works pretty easily. "Can you tell that I just cut your arm?" But with crypto, you need to wade through the excellent, but quite long, sci.crypt FAQ, if you even find a pointer to it. Altavista comes back with 48000 hits when asked for Crypto. "Introduction to cryptography" is a more tolerable 100 documents, but how to know which are good, and which are snake oil? The reputation software to help filter is lacking. So, I see a value to flaming the snake oil salesmen loudly, today. Not that we shouldn't let the market handle the situation, but part of that market is that crypto enthusiasts (aka cypherpunks) will flame the snake oil salesmen. Not that other issues you mention (such as the behinds the scenes deals) aren't important, but in the face of no information, we can't discuss that much. Adam Timothy C. May wrote: | Well, it seems to me that letting some real snake oil out there could be a | Good Thing. Being the Neo-Calvinist Darwinist that I am, I set that anyone | who puts valuable information into "PowerPads" and "Stream-of-Consciousness | Ciphers" pretty much deserves what he or she gets. I am not losing any | sleep that Snake Oil Enterprises is hyping a conceptually flawed system. -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume