Jeeez, I hope no one else sprained a finger getting the current stock price for Security Dynamics (SDTI). Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> took certain, ummm, dramatic liberties as he paraphrased a Boston Globe column yesterday on Bay State stocks that had "been discounted so deeply they raise eyebrows." Said Mr. Hettinga:
It seems that Security Dynamics, trading at about 6, about >10% or so of its high, is now considered an official dog >stock as defined by today's Boston Globe.
What the Globe actually said was: "Security Dynamics Technologies Inc. of Bedford, a leader in computer security and encryption, has fallen from an April high of 42 1/2 to 12 yesterday. It traded as low as 6 two weeks ago." Said Mr. Hettinga:
mention SD buying RSA, but they forgot to mention anything >about the RSA
Anyway, most of the comments in the article were about SD's >hardware token technology being made obsolete by digital >"certificates". (The Globe's quotes, but I agree with them. >Just like I put quotes around digital "signatures", which >are nothing of the kind, though I haven't heard of >something better call *them* yet, either.) The Globe did patent expiring soon. About the only thing >they said was valuable about SD was their share in that >roaring success, Verisign, Inc., who, the Globe seems to >imply, is evidently the sole marketer of those self-same
digital "certificates". I wonder what Thawte, CertCo, >Entrust, etc.made of *that* comment...
Hmmmm. What the Globe actually said was: "Security Dynamics made money for years selling authentication systems for corporate computer users and later acquired RSA Data Security, an Internet encryption leader. Now its original authentication products are being challenged by new technology using so-called ``digital certificates'' to make computer communication and commerce secure - a serious problem that has hurt the stock. "But Security Dynamics, with a current market value of about $490 million, could still offer a bigger company a leading position in the important computer security field and a huge embedded customer base. "Security Dynamics also owns a stake in Verisign Inc., a competitor in the digital certificate field. The company's cash and its investment in Verisign amount to about $6.50 per share, slightly more than half the stock's current price." Hettinga essays are like handball games: the damn ball is ricocheting off the side walls, both ends, the floor and the ceiling. Linear coherence and internal consistency are less important than the electrostatic energy and the rolling rhetorical thunder -- so hey, no big deal if he's a little frisky and expansive with the facts, right? For the full Globe article, cut & paste this URL: <http://www.boston.com/cgi-bin/passiton.cgi?globehtml/294/Among_Bay_State_s_b... ered_tech_fir.shtml> Wall Street has not been kind to SDTI, from whom I have collected many checks for contract assignments over the years. Mr. Hettinga's explanation of the market's dynamics is, at the very least, guaranteed to stimulate. Hettinga's apparent scorn for modern cryptography's obsession with strong authentication -- now manifest in the intensity with which professionals worry the issues around PKC binding, key certification, digital signatures, CA procedures (and in the demand for smartcards to secure X509 certs apart from the networked CPU) -- bespeaks a truly iconoclastic mind. What tucked me in for the night was the declaration -- from R.H., the avatar of DBTS, e-cash, and geodesic recursive auctions -- that (venture) capital is or will be counterproductive to entreprenurial enterprise in the New Age. Un huh. Doomed, as well, by the hesitation inherent in the merely human minds that control its flow (at least in Rob's universe of cybernetic fiscal structures.) Said Mr. Hettinga:
It's beginning to look like venture capital is an industrial phenomenon, requiring correspondingly long ramp-up times, and it may be that geodesic markets move too fast for any "consensus" of the investment community to be achieved and, um, capitalized upon, soon enough to make money on a consistent basis, or at least in the presence of a savvy management team.
Gotta love a guy who can write a sentence like that, knot and and double-knot it into a gangly tapestry -- and then glue the whole thing across a wonderful image like a "dirigible biplane." (That's a Hettinga vehicle is ever there was one. Even in the imagination, it pushes or pulls large amounts of gas around in an unusually muscular way;-) Suerte, _Vin ----- "Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege." _ A Thinking Man's Creed for Crypto _vbm. * Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> * 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548