On Fri, 21 Jul 1995, Lucky Green wrote:

At 19:15 7/21/95, bigdaddy@ccnet.com wrote: Depends on the load on the host, the speed of your link, the speed of your Mac, and if you want to trade features for speed at that given moment. It's more from the graphical interface than anything else, or has been. My Mac is a 25 MHz 040...not that fast these days, but pretty good. I simply miss being able to tab through my news.

The human interface is the whole point behind Newswatcher and Nuntius. As for Mac users that prefer tin, they already have an implementation available. It is called telnet. Unfortunately, with telnet(and yes, I do use this extensively), one is hobbled by the fact that the tin program resides on the other side of the link. In most cases, the link itself, and the machine it connects to, are insecure. This means that one cannot easily use PGP to auto-sign messages without keeping the key and a copy of PGP on the remote server.

One can, of course, pre-compose the message, sign/encrypt it, and then upload it, but that is a great deal of work compared to simply using TinSign. It also works against the spontaneous nature of news(for me, at least). When was the last time you went to a newsgroup knowing everything you would say in advance?

I have been thinking about writing AppleScripts that link Newswatcher with PGP. Unfortunately, there is another project that has precedence. Still, as with most great utility software not yet available, you can always try to write it yourself. I'm in the sixth week of my first programming class...as if that means anything. :-) I see your point, 'cypherpunks write code' and all. Simply wishing that I could run tin (relatively) securely on my Mac w/out needing to install FreeBSD or Linux(which I want to do, anyway).

David Molnar