Re: what's up with GROW?

>>>>> In article <199607101517.IAA19065@cygnus.com>, Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com> writes:

    > I didn't post there specifically, but John Gilmore may have done so a
    > while ago.  What specific problem are the cyberpunks trying to solve
    > that GROW would facilitate?

Sorry, I've just recieved so much complete incompetence with this
issue that talking to someone who was on the ball took some
adjusting.  Hope I wasn't too rude.

One of the main issue on cypherpunks right now (Black Unicorn did a
sort of "white paper" on it recently, as in two days ago) is
integrating cryptography with other apps, in particular WWW apps.  It
just seemed to me that if the kind of exstensibility which Emacs is
famous for was going to be a part of GROW, which apparently was the
attention, this would be a Good Thing for cryptography integration.  I
good point in this direction is that the most popular way of using PGP
with email is emacs-based (i.e. more people sign their posts to
cypherpunks using Mailcrypt, the emacs-PGP interface, then all other
signers combined, so it must be pretty easy to use).  I've used it,
and it's incredibly slick.  I had hopes the GROW to go as far as emacs
but with more network awareness.  Oh well.

This has been crossposted to cypherpunks, BTW.

-Robin

PS: You may want to go through and terf ALL the grow pages, not just
some of them.

To follow up further...we are very interested in deeply embedding
network security in all software components we deliver as "enterprise
solutions".  This is the commercial analog (I believe) of what
cypherpunks want in their personal space.  Our approach right now is to
view Kerberos as a solution to two problems (user authentication and key
management), and to extend basic services such as web servers, web
clients, etc., with Kerberos to build a coherent solution.

We believe that Java has effectively solved one of the problems that
GROW was intended to address: ubiquitous extensibility.  While some may
argue the finer points of just how powerful the Java model is compared
to the scheme model, there is a market momentum that argues for a level
of ubiquity that we could not have hoped to achieve through Scheme.

That said, perhaps it would be worthwhile to compare notes on current
Cygnus and Cyberpunks projects and approaches, to see if there are any
good synergies to tap.  Mark Eichin (our long-time V5 technical lead)
will be visiting from our Boston office the week of 7/22 for the Usenix
network security conference.  Perhaps we could have a mini meeting of
minds around that time.  Mark is eichin@cygnus.com.

Michael

P.S.  If the above sounds like more smoke than cyberpunks are accustomed
to, let me know in private email, and I'll continue follow-ups among
those who give me a positive response.