In a note to cypherpunks, Hal Finney comments on the new crypto initiative:
It's also not clear what the hardware manufacturers get out of this. Their sales overseas have never been blocked. There has been no demand for custom crypto hardware. I don't see how they have been harmed by an inability to ship computers with built-in encryption hardware. Granted there are some possible applications for such systems but I don't see the market demand which would drive this decision.
I'm not sure if I can answer this but, at last week's SF cypherpunks meeting, an Intel engineer asked whether there might be any interest in a computer chip with some sort of encryption mechanism built into the chip. As I understand it, this chip would process an encrypted instruction stream. I.e., it could not execute a program unless the "key" for that program was first loaded into the chip. An interesting idea: does anyone have more information? Martin Minow minow@apple.com