NY Times on e$

The NY Times today reports on "the first retail transaction on 
the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data 
encryption software designed to guarantee privacy."

Quotes:

"Even if the NSA was listening in, they couldn't get his credit 
card number," said Daniel M. Kohn, the 21-year-old chief 
executive of the Net Market Company of Nashua, N.H.

* * * *

The data encryption program is called PGP. . .

* * * *

"I think it's an important step in pioneering this work, but 
later on we'll probably see more exciting things in the way of 
digital cash," said Philip Z. Zimmermann . . .

In other words, [e$] are packets of worth that have value in 
cyberspace, the same way dollars have value in the real world, 
except that they have the properties of anonymity, privacy, and 
untraceability.  Many details remained to be worked out, Mr. 
Zimmermann said.

End quotes.

Includes discussion of net security and encryption.

See Business Section, pp. D1, D2.  AOL offers access to NY 
Times.

Anyone who wants a copy email me.

John

John Young says:
> The NY Times today reports on "the first retail transaction on 
> the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data 
> encryption software designed to guarantee privacy."

It was the usual Times junk. It wasn't the first retail transaction by
a long shot, and wasn't the first to use encryption by a long shot.

Unfortunately, the Times gave this beat to Lewis and not to Markoff,
and Lewis doesn't seem to think he has to "live" on the net and have a
personal feel for it in order to report on it. I'm sure he's not a bad
guy personally, but he's made a hash of almost every story he's
covered (sigh). (The recent story on the size of the internet
community was an especially bad one -- he didn't understand the
distinctions being made between people behind firewalls and people not
behind firewalls (I know of about 100,000 machines on wall street
behind firewalls), and didn't understand, probably because he doesn't
read the net too much, that there are fairly reliable statistics for
Usenet readership.)

Perry