Re: Netscape as vehicle for cypherpunk agenda/the cypherpunk bully pulpit

[Raph Levien <raph@CS.Berkeley.EDU>]

I agree with Sameer's points here. Netscape carries with it the
potential of revitalizing the cypherpunks agenda, but also, in the
worst case, making it irrelevant. What happens, I think, depends on
what we do.

On the plus side, Netscape 2.0 will, without a doubt, be the first
usable mail tool to incorporate real encryption. It may accomplish,
almost overnight, the long-held goal of making a nontrivial fraction
of Internet email secure.

Another potentially big win is the Java language. It seems to me that
it will be quite plausible to code up real crypto applications in this
language. Once coded, these applications will run on every important
platform in the universe, and can be accessible by the click of a
mouse. Perl-RSA was a sign of what's possible in the non-C world. One
caveat is the slowdown from the interpreted code (roughly a factor of
25). The best way to look at this is as a challenge, to use clever
coding tricks and intelligent architectures, including caching. The
speed of Java implementations will inevitably improve - in fact, I
might just be doing my PhD thesis on memory management in Java.

One potential downside, as Sameer points out, is the X.509
certification hierarchy. This ancient beast has the potential to
defeat many of the cypherpunk aims, most especially the possiblity of
anonymous communication. However, that's not a foregone conclusion.
The most important thing to be doing right now is to _understand_
what's happening. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be reading the
S/MIME and X.509 documentation, poring over reference code, and (of
course) playing with Netscape 2.0 myself. We're much more likely to
get our agenda implemented if we are armed with a good understanding.
There are lots of ways around X.509 - maybe we can work our way around
it, maybe we can adapt it to our needs, maybe we can come up with
something better and get it replaced. Whatever the case may be, we
should not give up hope.

Netscape is one manifestation of the ancient Chinese curse: may we
live in interesting times!

Raph