John Young says:
The NY Times today reports on "the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy."
It was the usual Times junk. It wasn't the first retail transaction by a long shot, and wasn't the first to use encryption by a long shot. Unfortunately, the Times gave this beat to Lewis and not to Markoff, and Lewis doesn't seem to think he has to "live" on the net and have a personal feel for it in order to report on it. I'm sure he's not a bad guy personally, but he's made a hash of almost every story he's covered (sigh). (The recent story on the size of the internet community was an especially bad one -- he didn't understand the distinctions being made between people behind firewalls and people not behind firewalls (I know of about 100,000 machines on wall street behind firewalls), and didn't understand, probably because he doesn't read the net too much, that there are fairly reliable statistics for Usenet readership.) Perry