Several people have posted to the list that the Chinese, censored, Internet will fail. Usually, the claim is that the censored network will fail mostly because of technical reasons, namely the inability of the Chinese government to censor everything. The other significant claim made was that the Chinese problem is "behind" the "firewall" leading into the country... Suggestions have been made that RSA is involved with China to implement this censorship. I would suggest that the Chinese solution to these problems is singular, and simple: the total inability to conduct any transaction anonymously. How can this occur? It takes two parts; one simple, one somewhat more difficult. The simple portion is a national (Chinese) database associating true names with key IDs. These keys will be usable only to sign documents, not to encrypt information, similar to the Federal DSS. The more complex portion (from my perspective, at any rate) is a modification of the standard TCP/IP protocol, requiring that each packet be signed by its originating user. This would require lots of software modification on the Chinese end, as well as a conversion process at the National firewall. (This is where the censorship takes place; the censors don't filter out unwanted information, they sign acceptable information. They then store a reference to the bit of information with a hash. If the hash checks out, they don't need to re-sign the data. This allows a ramp-up after a while to provide adequate quantities of information). The real question is who's going to design/implement this protocol? The answer is Western sofware companies which want to do business in China. RSA would obviously be called upon to design the protocol, as well as perhaps provide certain implementations of it. Another likely candidate is Microsoft, whose Windows OS has been declared a National Standard by China. It would hold obvious financial benifits for MS to develop a Chinese TCP/IP protocol for Windows. Any company which wants a monopoly in a country of > 1 billion people could probably get in on this deal. Now that all information has a recognizable source, dissidents in China can be arrested, and unacceptable information never makes it into the country. Can anybody say why this can't be implemented? Or why China wouldn't implement it? This is obviously a worst-case scenario, but one which appears, at least to me, to be technically feasable. I'd love to hear otherwise. Jon Lasser ---------- Jon Lasser (410)494-3072 - Obscenity is a crutch for jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu inarticulate motherfuckers. http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/ Finger for PGP key (1024/EC001E4D) - Fuck the CDA.