Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 2 Aug 2000 23:37:58 -0400 | From | "Michael H. Warfield" <> | Subject | Re: FW: Crypto |
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On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 12:02:50AM -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> I'd love to believe this, but the actions of the gov't wrt copyright > law goes very much against this. The Sonny Bono act which extended copyright > for another 20 years was totally retroactive. The Gutenburg Project actually > had to remove some books that had put online because they came back under > copyright restrictions due to the Sonny Bono act.
> I have no clue if they'd try the same thing here. Probably depends > on if some big business is pushing them.
Then, maybe, the answer is to take advange of the opportunity here and now to spread this as wide and as far as we possibly can so to place it totally outside of their reach. The barn door is open. Now is NOT the time to just let the horses stick their noses out. The time is now to kick them in the #$@$#@ and start a $#@$#@ stampede and make it clear that the barn is empty and slamming the doors will do NOTHING.
So WHAT if the US thinks to slam the door on FreeSWAN (let them try now, in the position they are in on the free speech issues in the courts). The sources are all over the globe and hosted in the Neitherlands. Just what do they think the US government could possibly do?
I'm sorry but... I do respect the guys on the FreeSWAN project but they are a bit paranoid and more than a bit cowardly. I can say that because I HAVE contributed to SSH (check the README file - I'm in there and it was illegal in the US at the time - OK, I didn't realize it at the time) and Eric Raymond and I DID decide to post the SSL patches to fetchmail (which I authored) on a US site before the US relaxed the regulations (and I DID realize it at the time and consulted with my companies crypto lawyer).
Sometimes I SWEAR the FreeSWAN gang are a bunch of hypocrits. They will "stand up for principle" when it comes to single DES and say "we won't support it, even in transision environments" because it is "insecure" and provides a "false sense of security" but then will say they won't tolerate the HINT of US tainted code because the US MIGHT change its mind. I understand that they are falling over backwards to avoid ever having to defend their principles. They made it clear. They don't want to merely be in a clean defensible position where the courts would find in their favor, they want to be so overwhelmingly safe that there would be nothing that could be brough against them for which they would have to defend themselves. Their principles, in both cases, are that they want to dictate their position in a way that imposes their politics and avoids any need for them to defend themselves in a confrontation.
They may have one other thing in mind too... Once KLIPS is in the kernel, nothing is prohibiting someone else from porting ISKMP from BSD or anywhere else (once PFKEY2 is fully supported) to Linux. FreeSWAN is two parts. KLIPS (the kernel part) and PLUTO (IKE - the user space part). Porting ISKMP from OpenBSD to Linux is already been discussed. If that happens, they can't dictate politics anymore. The horses will be out of more than one barn at that time... And that will be a very good thing. :-)
> Stephen
Mike -- Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@WittsEnd.com (The Mad Wizard) | (770) 331-2437 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!
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