Re: e$: Watching the MacRubble Bounce
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Man, you guys have way, WAY to much time on your hands. CP is starting to sound more like a bunch of bickering old ladies than the usual bickering group of old ladies (uh I mean crytpo anarchists) . I would have responded and put a round through the head of this discussion a few days ago, but my digest feed to cp died a few days ago. Since all this crap seems to center around a conversation between me and Tim , and really should have stayed that way, (Bob, consider this a rap on the nose with a rolled up newspaper) lets just clear up a few points nad then please move on to the next subject. By developer demand I am hosting a technical workshop for Mac Crypto developers <http://webstuff.apple.com/~opentpt/crypto.html> and asked Tim if he would like to speak, I though that since he has so much interesting stuff to say on the net that he might want to share it with some folks who write code for a living. Tim declined. no problem, normaly that would have ended it there, but Tim went on to state that I excluded him from the Mac Crypto list, I replied that I did no such thing and that I inherited the list (and hence any guilt I guess), He went on further deriding the Mac. I have been on the net long enough to no longer care about religious wars about "how long who's pull down menu was", BUT, I belive that Tim was a bit out of line with some of his comments about Mac Developers and Apple employees. I have a problem with that. We emailed a bit and came to the agreement that Tim would not be an appropriate speaker for a Mac technical workshop. fine, end of story,lets move on. But then Bob comes along and does his rant, the point was not so much to pick on Tim, which I belive he didnt name, but more to point out why the Mac is an important platform for crypto. Tim reacted and the pissing started. Lets just end it now. I am sure you all have better things to do. What I am concerned with is that in all the noise the following points are being lost in the fog of war. 1) there a a LOT of Mac clients on the Net. windoze might be popular in the corporate office, but Macs are still easier to configure (prove me wrong), and hence do have a place in this world. 1a) The Mac also has one of the best networking environment available for the desktop platform, OpenTransport IS very fast. And do me a favor dont complain about opendoc until youve tryed and write code with OLE. 2) Apple is nowhere near dead, anyone who says this is either smoking something harsh or lives in media painted world. The same people that say Macs are dead are the same uneducated liberal buttheads who write in the San Jose Merc Pravda about how a disarmed populus is a free(h)er one. 3) If you want strong crypto to get to the masses then you better start paying attention to genetic deversity or as I like to call it Watership Down syndrome, If you put all your crypto eggs in Bill's basket then don't complain when you find that the MicroSoft CAPI only supports escrowed keys. so lets all grow a little thicker skin and move on with it. while you all piss and moan, your rights are being stolen away, If you want to help crypto suceed then you have to care about Macs, just as much as windoze or Sun or Be or whatever platform. Back to work. Vinnie Moscaritolo ------------------ "friends come and friends go..but enemies accumulate." http://www.vmeng.com/vinnie/ Fingerprint: 4FA3298150E404F2782501876EA2146A
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Vinnie Moscaritolo <vinnie@webstuff.apple.com> writes:
2) Apple is nowhere near dead, anyone who says this is either smoking something harsh or lives in media painted world. The same people that say Macs are dead are the same uneducated liberal buttheads who write in the San Jose Merc Pravda about how a disarmed populus is a free(h)er one.
Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officially" dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for the Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.
so lets all grow a little thicker skin and move on with it. while you all piss and moan, your rights are being stolen away, If you want to help crypto suceed then you have to care about Macs, just as much as windoze or Sun or Be or whatever platform.
Please don't waste valuable resources writing software for a dead platform. Mac crypto software is as useless as CP/M or Apple ][ crypto software. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
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Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officially" dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for the Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.
If you accept that, then doesn't that make writing crypto software for any Unix platform *even more* of a waste of time? Because last time I checked, there were way more Macs on mom-and-pop's desks than Unix machines, counting *all* vendors. Even if Apple folded *tomorrow*, those machines wouldn't vaporize. If you put easy-to-use strong crypto on a significant fraction of those desks six months from now, your work could easily have a lifetime of a year and a half even in your worst case scenario. (PS, I haven't used a Mac since 1985, so that's not why I say this.) -- Jamie Zawinski jwz@netscape.com http://www.netscape.com/people/jwz/ ``A signature isn't a return address, it is the ASCII equivalent of a black velvet clown painting; it's a rectangle of carets surrounding a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who.'' -- Chris Maeda
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Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com> writes:
Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officiall dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.
If you accept that, then doesn't that make writing crypto software for any Unix platform *even more* of a waste of time? Because last time I checked, there were way more Macs on mom-and-pop's desks than Unix machines, counting *all* vendors.
Irrelevant. Unix boxes are multi-user.
Even if Apple folded *tomorrow*, those machines wouldn't vaporize. If you put easy-to-use strong crypto on a significant fraction of those desks six months from now, your work could easily have a lifetime of a year and a half even in your worst case scenario.
Scenario 1: writing a multi-platform comm program with strong crypto, and including a Mac port (like Mac PGP, or clients for various tcp/ip protocols) is only a minor waste of time. Scenario 2: writing an encrypted filesystem for the Mac is a minor waste. Scenario 3: Writing a comm program that lets Macs talk to each other with no consideration that some Mac users may wish to talk to other platform (or any other Mac-only software) is a major waste of time. Of course, Apple is pushing #3. They're worse than Microsoft. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps
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Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote: Scenario 3: Writing a comm program that lets Macs talk to each other with no consideration that some Mac users may wish to talk to other platform (or any other Mac-only software) is a major waste of time.
Of course, Apple is pushing #3. They're worse than Microsoft.
Actually, we're not "pushing" this, we shipped it last year. It's available for all Macintosh (that have enough memory) computers in System 7.5.3 at no additional cost. For cypherpunks, it has two limitations: -- It requires a mutually-trusted nameserver. -- It is limited to 40-bit encryption to comply with ITAR. -- A version that does not encrypt the data channel is provided for countries with crypto import restrictions. On the other hand, it preserves authentication and is protected against replay attacks. The API's are published (and we provide sample code), so "any" Mac application can use the protocols to talk to "any" other application. Martin Minow minow@apple.com
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Jamie Zawinski wrote:
If you accept that, then doesn't that make writing crypto software for any Unix platform *even more* of a waste of time? Because last time I checked, there were way more Macs on mom-and-pop's desks than Unix machines, counting *all* vendors.
Pardon my French, but you mus be fucking stupid or somehing. How many universities use UNIX platforms? How many companies use UNIX platforms? Sun, DEC, and SGI don't stay in buisiness by building cheap Windows boxes ya know. There are 13948 _registered_ LINUX machines, not to mention the unregistered ones. Don't tell me that Cray's were designed to run MacOS or Windows 95. UNIX isn' NEARLY as dead as Apple is. --Deviant Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. -- Spock, "The Enterprise Incident", stardate 5027.4 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBMgrZbTAJap8fyDMVAQFSagf8C3/HIX7XwtFYRAKxhs8AlDIsO1EXDgr9 jm9RzjGMXqHkgg0OC/0Bzp+OtcYYL5qg/JtaZo90LIdPbqEeOb7HkcYgXkPZ9SLd sQKIsZMr6IShG7ZIdPH9BRJWn131ExbUjCZ5IfMJVHsimTVbfLHHSppDylxtl2bG pI6d9FdCWj8puL3omB9PD9gpjoaF4p961+HBclH8W6PLzI+swc/6f49Uxv3LIF4w gm5IepZmoerW2iK2hwawngZPZJ4Sr4VqzyrAIvDl+rIFLFlN3ejNaGEjwHcNc43+ IBwoOS4kdv16faxT1jBskbKhcywmGqfIrap6Rdr0KkO5DyHHsSTz5g== =UBUr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officially" dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for the Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.
Considering the fact that exactly this sort of advice has been offerred and has been wrong for over a decade, why should this oracular statement be any more accurate? Note that there is excellent crypto software available for the Mac (CryptDisk, PGPFone, and MacPGP for example). Vinnie's effort is a welcome attempt to arrange the "plumbing" so that crypto software is even more accessible on the most accessible OS. Sniping from the cheap seats is the last thing he should have to endure.
participants (6)
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dlv@bwalk.dm.com
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Jamie Zawinski
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Martin Minow
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Steve Bryan
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The Deviant
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Vinnie Moscaritolo