Re: e$: Watching the MacRubble Bounce

Man,
 you guys have way, WAY to much time on your hands. CP is starting to sound
more like a bunch of bickering old ladies than the usual bickering group of
old ladies (uh I mean crytpo anarchists) . I would have responded and put a
round through the head of this discussion a few days ago, but my digest
feed to cp died a few days ago.

Since all this  crap seems to center around a conversation between me and
Tim , and really should have stayed that way, (Bob, consider this a rap on
the nose with a rolled up newspaper) lets just clear up a few points nad
then please move on to the next subject.

By developer demand I am hosting a technical workshop for Mac Crypto
developers <http://webstuff.apple.com/~opentpt/crypto.html> and asked Tim
if he would like to speak, I though that since he has so much interesting
stuff to say on the net that he might want to share it with some folks who
write code for a living.

Tim declined. no problem, normaly that would have ended it there, but Tim
went on to state that I excluded him from the Mac Crypto list, I replied
that I did no such thing and that I inherited the list (and hence any guilt
I guess), He went on further deriding the Mac.

I have been on the net long enough to no longer care about religious wars
about "how long who's pull down menu was", BUT, I belive that Tim was a bit
out of line with some of his comments about Mac Developers and Apple
employees. I have a problem with that. We emailed a bit and came to the
agreement that Tim would not be an appropriate speaker for a Mac technical
workshop. fine, end of story,lets move on.

But then Bob comes along and does his rant, the point was not so much to
pick on Tim, which I belive he didnt name, but more to point out why the
Mac is an important platform for crypto. Tim reacted and the pissing
started. Lets just end it now. I am sure you all have better things to do.

What I am concerned with is that in all the noise the following points are
being lost in the fog of war.

1) there a a LOT of Mac clients on the Net. windoze might be popular in the
corporate office, but Macs are still easier to configure (prove me wrong),
and hence do have a place in this world.

1a) The Mac also has one of the best networking environment available for
the desktop platform, OpenTransport IS very fast. And do me a favor dont
complain about opendoc until youve tryed and write code with OLE.

2) Apple is nowhere near dead, anyone who says this is either smoking
something harsh or lives in media painted world. The same people that say
Macs are dead are the same uneducated liberal buttheads who write in the
San Jose Merc Pravda about how a disarmed populus is a free(h)er one.

3) If you want strong crypto to get to the masses then you better start
paying attention to genetic deversity or as I like to call it Watership
Down syndrome, If you put all your crypto eggs in Bill's basket then don't
complain when you find that the MicroSoft CAPI only supports escrowed keys.

so lets all grow a little thicker skin and move on with it. while you all
piss and moan, your rights are being stolen away, If you want to help
crypto suceed then you have to care about Macs, just as much as windoze or
Sun or Be or whatever platform.

Back to work.





Vinnie Moscaritolo
------------------
"friends come and friends go..but enemies accumulate."
http://www.vmeng.com/vinnie/
Fingerprint: 4FA3298150E404F2782501876EA2146A

>Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officially"
>dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for the
>Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.

Considering the fact that exactly this sort of advice has been offerred and
has been wrong for over a decade, why should this oracular statement be any
more accurate? Note that there is excellent crypto software available for
the Mac (CryptDisk, PGPFone, and MacPGP for example). Vinnie's effort is a
welcome attempt to arrange the "plumbing" so that crypto software is even
more accessible on the most accessible OS. Sniping from the cheap seats is
the last thing he should have to endure.

Vinnie Moscaritolo <vinnie@webstuff.apple.com> writes:
> 2) Apple is nowhere near dead, anyone who says this is either smoking
> something harsh or lives in media painted world. The same people that say
> Macs are dead are the same uneducated liberal buttheads who write in the
> San Jose Merc Pravda about how a disarmed populus is a free(h)er one.

Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officially"
dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for the
Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.

> so lets all grow a little thicker skin and move on with it. while you all
> piss and moan, your rights are being stolen away, If you want to help
> crypto suceed then you have to care about Macs, just as much as windoze or
> Sun or Be or whatever platform.

Please don't waste valuable resources writing software for a dead platform.
Mac crypto software is as useless as CP/M or Apple ][ crypto software.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
> 
> Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officially"
> dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for the
> Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.

If you accept that, then doesn't that make writing crypto software for
any Unix platform *even more* of a waste of time?  Because last time I
checked, there were way more Macs on mom-and-pop's desks than Unix
machines, counting *all* vendors.

Even if Apple folded *tomorrow*, those machines wouldn't vaporize.
If you put easy-to-use strong crypto on a significant fraction of
those desks six months from now, your work could easily have a lifetime
of a year and a half even in your worst case scenario.

(PS, I haven't used a Mac since 1985, so that's not why I say this.)


-- 
Jamie Zawinski    jwz@netscape.com   http://www.netscape.com/people/jwz/
``A signature isn't a return address, it is the ASCII equivalent of a
  black velvet clown painting; it's a rectangle of carets surrounding
  a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who.''
                                                         -- Chris Maeda

> Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
>Scenario 3: Writing a comm program that lets Macs talk to each other with
>no consideration that some Mac users may wish to talk to other platform
>(or any other Mac-only software) is a major waste of time.
>
>Of course, Apple is pushing #3. They're worse than Microsoft.
>

Actually, we're not "pushing" this, we shipped it last year. It's available
for all Macintosh (that have enough memory) computers in System 7.5.3
at no additional cost.

For cypherpunks, it has two limitations:

-- It requires a mutually-trusted nameserver.
-- It is limited to 40-bit encryption to comply with ITAR.
-- A version that does not encrypt the data channel is provided
   for countries with crypto import restrictions.

On the other hand, it preserves authentication and is protected
against replay attacks. The API's are published (and we provide
sample code), so "any" Mac application can use the protocols to
talk to "any" other application.

Martin Minow
minow@apple.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Jamie Zawinski wrote:

> If you accept that, then doesn't that make writing crypto software for
> any Unix platform *even more* of a waste of time?  Because last time I
> checked, there were way more Macs on mom-and-pop's desks than Unix
> machines, counting *all* vendors.

Pardon my French, but you mus be fucking stupid or somehing.  How many
universities use UNIX platforms?  How many companies use UNIX platforms?
Sun, DEC, and SGI don't stay in buisiness by building cheap Windows boxes
ya know.  There are 13948 _registered_ LINUX machines, not to mention the
unregistered ones.  Don't tell me that Cray's were designed to run MacOS
or Windows 95.  UNIX isn' NEARLY as dead as Apple is.

 --Deviant
Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.
                -- Spock, "The Enterprise Incident", stardate 5027.4


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Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com> writes:
> Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM wrote:
> >
> > Apple computer is dead, for all intents and purposes. It will be "officiall
> > dead (bankrupt) within a couple of years. Writing any sort of software for
> > Mac - crypto or otherwise - is a waste of time.
>
> If you accept that, then doesn't that make writing crypto software for
> any Unix platform *even more* of a waste of time?  Because last time I
> checked, there were way more Macs on mom-and-pop's desks than Unix
> machines, counting *all* vendors.

Irrelevant. Unix boxes are multi-user.

> Even if Apple folded *tomorrow*, those machines wouldn't vaporize.
> If you put easy-to-use strong crypto on a significant fraction of
> those desks six months from now, your work could easily have a lifetime
> of a year and a half even in your worst case scenario.

Scenario 1: writing a multi-platform comm program with strong crypto, and
including a Mac port (like Mac PGP, or clients for various tcp/ip protocols)
is only a minor waste of time.

Scenario 2: writing an encrypted filesystem for the Mac is a minor waste.

Scenario 3: Writing a comm program that lets Macs talk to each other with
no consideration that some Mac users may wish to talk to other platform
(or any other Mac-only software) is a major waste of time.

Of course, Apple is pushing #3. They're worse than Microsoft.

---

Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps