Re: Reducing the Flames, Attacks, and Nit-Pickings
At 4:25 AM 10/23/95, Todd Glassey wrote:
At 2:18 AM 10/22/95, Todd Glassey wrote:
As an aside - What blows my mind is the number of cycles people spend bitching and moaning about Java itself rather than working to create a better solution.
My apologies, I should have taken this off-line with Dr. Fred. I did in my response to him as I had some personal commentary to add which would have beebn inappropriate to the list in general.
Just to make things clear, when I quoted Todd Glassey's point (above), it was because I _agreed_ with his point about the "bitching and moaning" about Java, as an example. I was _not_ quoting it as an example of the flames on the list, per se. My concern is that the Cypherpunks list is evolving into a "bug list," concentrating on attacks on commercial products. As I've said, finding major flaws in protocols is a useful thing to do, but having the list focussed on debating the fine details of languages like Java and browsers like Netscape seems to be less useful. Worse, idle speculation about possible security flaws seems wasteful. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Timothy C. May writes:
Worse, idle speculation about possible security flaws seems wasteful.
Not always. A couple of months ago someone was asking what the fuss was about in making sure random number generators were secure. In describing potential problems with poor RNG seeds I "idly" speculated that if Netscape has a lousy RNG that it might be *lots* easier to attack that than the (then current) brute force attack was. A week or to later, Ian posted a reverse engineered copy of the Netscape RNG stuff, and a week or so after that announced his big hole. Occasionally, idle speculation sparks good ideas.
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