Re: US Postal Public Key

At 10:39 AM 8/4/94 -0400, John Young quoted others as writing:

>Richard Rothwell, Senior Director of Technology Integration for 
>the USPS, officially released the news today in Quebec City, in a 
>paper delivered to an international working group of the Information
>Security Committee of the American Bar Association's Section of
>Science and Technology, which has been developing guidelines 
>for public key certification authorities. 

What is the most important character in the above paragraph?

The 's' in 'authorities.'  It means no monopoly.

DCF

Who will be using the (now private) *Dutch* Post Office as (one of) *his*
certification authorities.

frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell) writes:

>What is the most important character in the above paragraph?

>The 's' in 'authorities.'  It means no monopoly.

Yes, towards the end they made it clear that this was not intended to
be a monopolized certification hierarchy, but one of many.  There was
even a reference to "peer-to-peer" certification, which I thought might
refer to a web of trust.

It's not nice to make fun of the Post Office; they're such an easy target.
But I couldn't help finding that the archaic all-caps format and the little
"^G" characters by the bulleted points reminded me of the old 110-baud
ASR-33 clankety teletypes I used in college, with each little bulleted
point going "ding", "ding", as it printed out (^G being the bell character
in ASCII).  It didn't exactly bring to mind the streamlined new PO the
speaker wanted to convey.

Hal