Re: The Value of Money (fwd) (fwd)
It's people like this that make me seriously rethink my anti-gun regulation stance. -uni- (Dark) why what ever do you mean? i think all american's should not have guns or crypto. it would make for a safer society in that the government could make sure there would be no more crime or pesky drug dealers using cyfered messages to transmit their buy and sell orders on international email. right-on ban crypto. of course the way this group is going nobody outside of the internet clique will ever get there hands on pgp or other crypto software. i tried to find pgp on local bbs's in phoenix and had to call 8 of them before i found 1 downloadable zip. the average users do not even know it is available. thru ignorance of the bulk of the populace you will fail in your crypto efforts. that is a shame too. you, and your group may know all there is about crypto and may write the best crypto programs ever written. butttttttttt......... without everyday clueless non-internet/ftp/pgp familiar users, crypto is pointless. the power is in distribution. and distribution breeds familiarity and contempt for the governments brand of escrowed key system. given the choice of one item in a resturant you only eat what is served to you. with multiple items you choose the best. face it, if crypto is outlawed it is too easy to clean out the net so to speak. if nothing is agressivly distributed then the people will not have it. if the people do not have it why waste your time writing it. if it is made illegal you will be an outlaw. if you have distributed in major cities before hand then at least the public has and will have access. -- * Spelling errors are intentional and international * Jim Nalbandian netcomsv!lassie!jim%lassie@netcom.com Tempe, Arizona, USA N7SZS@K7BUC.AZ.US.NA No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain there right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. <-------- Thomas Jefferson --
It's people like this that make me seriously rethink my anti-gun regulation stance.
-uni- (Dark)
why what ever do you mean? i think all american's should not have
I believe he means that you appear basically out of nowhere, send about 20 messages to the list with very little content, and appear to not have even been reading much of the list. I may be wrong, but it appears to me that you saw the list in a recent publication and joined it sometime in mid-to-late April. However, not to make this a flaming letter, I would like to address your distribution point. And I must agree that the distribution of PGP has been fairly Internet-biased. However one reason, IMHO, that this is the case is that private BBSs were afraid to carry PGP because of the questionable legality w.r.t. the RSA patent. With the advent of PGP 2.5, to be released soon, this problem will go away in the US, and I believe that we will see a great number of distribution sites go online. I don't know if the government is going to ban crypto, but I am going to fight my darndest to try to stop them from doing so. The question about criminals using crypto is a crock -- even if they ban it, the criminals will still use it: that's why they are criminals, they don't follow the law! So banning crypto will basically get the government nowhere (then again, I feel the same way about the outlawing of guns, but see where that went). Another thing is that right now, I don't think that every person and his mother would know what to do if they had PGP. It requires, currently, some base of knowledge to successfully use crypto, and it is really easy to have a false sence of security. For example, Joe Average ComputerUser is using PGP. He is on a shared machine and keeps his private key online, has a 6-character passphrase (his dog's name) and types it over the modem... Yet this person thinks that no one can read his files since they are encrypted using PGP! No, this is not the right way to do it. We need to educate people about the risks of NOT using encryption, and when they understand the risks and start asking how to not be at risk, *then* you can show them PGP and explain how it fills the holes, and what it can and cannot do. That is the way that we will have to do it. And that is what we have (or at least I have) been trying to accomplish. I hope this makes sence to you. -derek Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, G MIT Media Laboratory Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) Home page: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/warlord/home_page.html warlord@MIT.EDU PP-ASEL N1NWH PGP key available
participants (2)
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Derek Atkins -
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