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Re: Keep Out--The Journal of Electronic Privacy


rr> About "Keep Out": you might want to be more precise in your blurbs.  As
rr> things stand, I'm leery of trusting anything I might see in
rr> your journal.

rr> RSA is not broken, as far as I know.  If you have verifiable details that
rr> it has, that'll be quite a scoop.  If you meant to say "the _factoring_ of
rr> RSA-129," well, you should have said that instead.

My apologies to the net.  RSA is certainly not broken, and I was aware of that
when this press release was written.  My word choice was sloppy.  In the
article, the information comes from people I have interviewed who have direct,
first-hand knowledge of the effort--people like Arjen Lenstra, who wrote the
software that made the factoring possible.

rr> >        *  An interview with Phil Zimmermann, including his thoughts on
rr> privacy in the digital age, export controls on cryptography, the
rr> copyright on RSA (the algorithm used in PGP), and information on his
rr> struggle with US Customs over exporting PGP

rr> A publisher, of all people, really needs to understand what a copyright
rr> is.  Note that we cannot copyright ideas, only our expression of those
rr> ideas.  Referring to a copyright on "the algorithm used in PGP" is
rr> nonsense.  Instead, PKP holds licensing rights to a system _patent_ on
rr> using RSA to perform public key encryption.

Again, I used sloppy language.  And again, my apologies.

This is certainly not the last mistake I will make.  There will be errors in
Keep Out.  However, I will do my damndest to make sure Keep Out remains as
accurate and unbiased as it can be.

And when I make mistakes, I trust Cypherpunks to let me know about them, so I
don't repeat the mistakes.  It's a damn sure bet I won't be making these two
errors again!

--John Schofield
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