have to get my two cents in: netscape has a proposal that secures the *transport* of files. pgp and the like secure the actual files themselves. the question that will have to be answered is "which method of security is more valuable to the internet as a whole?" of course i have made up my mind, but i'll waste some space and share those thoughts here. i sit on a committee at the college of agriculture here at uf, where we are discussing how to implement the web. many of these people come from beauracratic and publishing (the college publishes lots) backgrounds. they want control and accountability. they don't want someone to download some chemical information, believing that it is correct (as certified by the university), but in actuality that information was forged. i (and a few others) brought up digital signatures as a way of guaranteeing authenticity of documents. but this would an awful pain to implement, simply because the products do not support it. ssl can not provide this. ssl can guarantee that the document was not modified from the server it originated from until i got it. but who is to say that the server i got it from was the authoritative server? that's merely one example of where ssl provides no added benefit, but other encryption technologies do. so what is a better solution? i would choose a mime multipart using pgp or some other cryptographic method. if integrated into the web client, it could be just as seamless to the user, but now instead of encrypting the link between two computers, it encrypts (or signs) the document itself, since that's what i'm really interested in anyway (is the document). i could care little about the link - and that's the premise of the internet, that the link is unimportant as long as it works. so while ssl may well be a wonderful protocol, it does not address the problems that many cypherpunks see as being real. i think it would do netscape good to listen to and consider the views of many on this list, as they have many genuinely good ideas, even if they choose a confrontational manner. -avi