Re: Clipper III on the table

[stewarts@ix.netcom.com]

Hip Hip Hooray!  Clinton will finally let us use _some_
20+year-old encryption code, which has been known to be relatively
weak for 15 years, as long as we give them all our keys!  What a guy!

I assume he's partly doing this to make a big "See, I'm in favor
of high-tech trade and crime-fighting" push in time for the election,
and unlike RC4/40, cracking DES on general-purpose processors
_is_ a big enough job that probably can't do a distributed crack
in two weeks.  But still, get real - the NBS/NIST kept recertifying DES
every 5 years only because it was in widespread use and there weren't
good fast alternatives for the first couple of years (except triple-DES,
which on the computers of the time was annoyingly slow.)  
There were far more powerful systems like Diffie-Hellman and later RSA 
that were too slow for general use and are now fairly practical,
but they're not letting us use them....


>>Here we go again...from today's NYTimes...Clipper III
...
>That URL is http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/1001code.html


#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	
# You can get PGP software outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto