The Crypto Winter

[dmolnar]

On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Tim May wrote:


> and the security departments of leading dot com and Net companies.  Even
> Mojo Nation, which had about half a dozen list members in it--not much
> being heard from it now.

I don't know about what's happening to Mojo Nation exactly, but it seemed
to me that they were focusing on "P2P." Since that isn't doing so well
these days, I'm not sure where they are. They were at the O'Reilly P2P
conference earlier this month, but I wasn't, so I don't know what was
said.

> confused things, and now there are probably fewer PGP users than in
> 1996. (Multiple versions, an OpenPGP version, a GPG effort, Zimmermann
> at Hushmail, and NAI saying they plan to demphasize PGP....already a
> moot point.)

On the other hand, PGP integration with mailers and OS is further along
than in 1996, at least on Windows. I use Outlook/PGP for work all the
time. (On Unix, there's premail, some pgp/pine scripts, built-in mutt
support, and I'm not sure what else).

> efforts. (By the way, the only book that I know of on Peer-to-Peer
> computing has references to the pioneering role that Cypherpunks played,
> in remailers, in screen-saver code crackers, etc. Look to the archives
> from 1992-94 and one will see most of the P2P issues covered, from the
> point of view of distributed, agoric models, black markets, etc. My own
> BlackNet, 1988, is obviously a P2P model.)

Our chapter for that book included some of this. In retrospect it didn't
include enough; in particular, omitting Ian Grigg and systemics, inc was a
particularly bad oversight (and mostly mine). The second edition of the
book was recently cancelled, unfortunately.

-David