It's people like this that make me seriously rethink my anti-gun regulation stance.
-uni- (Dark)
why what ever do you mean? i think all american's should not have
I believe he means that you appear basically out of nowhere, send about 20 messages to the list with very little content, and appear to not have even been reading much of the list. I may be wrong, but it appears to me that you saw the list in a recent publication and joined it sometime in mid-to-late April. However, not to make this a flaming letter, I would like to address your distribution point. And I must agree that the distribution of PGP has been fairly Internet-biased. However one reason, IMHO, that this is the case is that private BBSs were afraid to carry PGP because of the questionable legality w.r.t. the RSA patent. With the advent of PGP 2.5, to be released soon, this problem will go away in the US, and I believe that we will see a great number of distribution sites go online. I don't know if the government is going to ban crypto, but I am going to fight my darndest to try to stop them from doing so. The question about criminals using crypto is a crock -- even if they ban it, the criminals will still use it: that's why they are criminals, they don't follow the law! So banning crypto will basically get the government nowhere (then again, I feel the same way about the outlawing of guns, but see where that went). Another thing is that right now, I don't think that every person and his mother would know what to do if they had PGP. It requires, currently, some base of knowledge to successfully use crypto, and it is really easy to have a false sence of security. For example, Joe Average ComputerUser is using PGP. He is on a shared machine and keeps his private key online, has a 6-character passphrase (his dog's name) and types it over the modem... Yet this person thinks that no one can read his files since they are encrypted using PGP! No, this is not the right way to do it. We need to educate people about the risks of NOT using encryption, and when they understand the risks and start asking how to not be at risk, *then* you can show them PGP and explain how it fills the holes, and what it can and cannot do. That is the way that we will have to do it. And that is what we have (or at least I have) been trying to accomplish. I hope this makes sence to you. -derek Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, G MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) Home page: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/warlord/home_page.html warlord@MIT.EDU PP-ASEL N1NWH PGP key available