At 08:03 AM 11/22/98, you wrote:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2168153,00.html

well, no matter wh'appens, microsoft is going to come out of this smelling like a rose

"By the time the government's case is done, who knows how the industry will look?" he said. "And furthermore, it could open the door to more government regulation of the technology industry overall."

putting on my favorite cryptoparanoia hat, over the next five years: o MS gets what it wants -- more regulation, forcing it to stop selling OSs with computers. instead, if you by an MS OS, you'll rent it annually. ["please, janet, don't throw me in that briar patch!"] to do this, MS has to get intel to put crypto hooks in the wintel architecture; microcode burned-in at the chip fab that prevents MS operating systems from running on other h/w o intel gets what it wants: no clones. if you want to run linux on your AMD K-10, feel free. if AMD wants to get in the game, they'll have to visit ft. meade o the government gets what it wants, because the crypto hooks in the wintel architecture allow KRAP to proceed without any pesky legislation -- just behind-doors agreements with MS and intel a more cynical person than me might note that sun's "java OS" that would run anywhere would be a *lot* more difficult to suborn at the chip level i haven't figured out how the communications infrastructure is going to be noodled. maybe it doesn't have to be. expect ipsec to die a long, slow death -- a delaying tactic, the best kind for the feds, because it prevents any sucessors from getting up a head of steam. [i don't know beans about the current status of ipsec] long about 2020 or so it'll be a federal offense to own an EPROM burner, a processor with re-flashed microcode, an unlicensed logic analyzer, or a copy of linux... :-) [stay tuned for a short story about the freedom fighters of 2025, hacking secure communications on copies of the last architectures known not to be compromised ("daddy, what's a PDP-10?"), running ITS on souped-up gigahertz pocket portables, getting packets through on covert channels involving the coat-tails of the (now ubiquitous) KRAP session key negotiations...] -landon [re-lurking]