Re: Pretty Good Privacy Not Looking So Great

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@gambetta.ICS.uci.edu)
Fri, 05 Dec 1997 14:17:12 -0800

> But what we have here is not so much a seeling of code but a selling of
> the very spirit that he, Phil Zimmerman, stated so well in his original
> PGP doc. The idea that strong encryption should be available to every one
> and that no governing body should act so as to weaken the keys for thier
> own use.

Imagine if you will, a loosely knit group of poor programmers and graduate
students, cooperating through both time and space, disperesed over the
world (wide web) writing this patchy thing. Along comes a great big
Grendel-beast and sayeth to each of them, "Hey, how about $100 million a
head for your guys's market share?", but immediately afterwards the sun
will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars
will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Would software and the WWW ever be the same? What is keeping them from
doing so?

Greg