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Two Turntables and a Clipper Chip
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- Subject: Two Turntables and a Clipper Chip
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- Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 08:24:19 -0500
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Two turntables and a
Clipper chip
By Skinny DuBaud
January 15, 1998
SAN FRANCISCO--In what certainly was
not a hacker's delight, RSA Data
Security CEO Jim Bidzos stunned the
crowd at his company's annual
conference this week as he joined
old-school rappers The Sugar Hill Gang
for a detourned version of da Gang's
classic, "Rapper's Delight."
Well aware that he's no Kool Moe Dee,
Bidzos hip-hopped his way through the
modified lyrics, which contained such
sparkling couplets as... "They once
proposed a thing called Clipper
Now there's something new that ain't
much hipper
Key recovery won't work, so the experts
say
But the government wants to push it on
us anyway"
and
"I like hip hip hop
I like to online shop
I trust RSA
To keep the hackers at bay"
...then promised never to pull such a
stunt again. The RSA conference
audience of
crypto-math
geeks,
cyberlibertarians,
and snoop-dogs
cheered, of
course. They'd
throw their
hands in the air
(and wave them
like they just
don't care) for a
wet sponge if it smelled
antiauthoritarian, but many breathed a
sigh of relief.
Despite the awkward moments, Bidzos,
who's made quite a name for himself as
a public enemy of the federal
government's restrictions on the export
of encryption software, looked
mahvelous sporting a fresh Van Dyke
facial-hair arrangement on his
prizefighter's mug. He apparently grew
the ensemble to match the Sugar Hill
Gang--in appearance at least, if not in
dope MC talent. Always the suave host,
Jim will be back among his tribe at the
end-of-conference gala, for which the
company has rented out the California
Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate
Park.
The Skintelligentsia certainly will be
there looking out for any
representatives of Pretty Good Privacy,
the crypto company enmeshed in legal
battles with RSA. The PGP-brains don't
have a booth at the RSA conference this
year, but in celebration of their merger
with Network Associates--the newly
formed utility software company, that
is, not the PR agency--they managed to
throw a soiree last night at the
Marky-Mark Hopkins Hotel, right
across the street from the RSA
proceedings at the equally fly Fairmont.
Speaking of snubs, crypto rivals
VeriSign and GTE, whose booths at the
Fairmont were practically alongside one
another, have been playing a bit of
one-upmanship recently. Certificate
authority (CA) VeriSign uses hardware
storage from BBN to safeguard software
encryption keys at its Silicon Valley
offices. The hardware--which looks like
small blue boxes about the size of a
desktop telephone set--is the crypto
equivalent of a strong box, ostensibly
impervious to hackers. But BBN was
recently bought by GTE, which owns
rival CA Cybertrust Solutions, and all of
a sudden, VeriSign isn't satisfied with
the "performance" of those little blue
boxes. The company has started looking
elsewhere for its strong-box solutions,
according to a Skinside source. How
will users of encryption trust the
"trusted third parties" if the trusted
third parties don't trust each other?
Staying in Baghdad by the Bay, the
conspiracy birds are clacking their
beaks over the latest public
transportation developments. S.F.'s
Municipal Railway (or "Muni," as the
local posse calls it) has just opened an
extension from the end of Market
Street down to Willie Mays Plaza, now
just a gaping pit where the new
baseball stadium will spring up by the
year 2000. The shorthand for the new
rail spur? "MMX," short for Muni Metro
Extension. Sure, the project's gone over
budget, but I swear it fixed that
floating-point problem years ago...
Speaking of Big Willie Style, San Fran's
mayor Willie Brown--who looks great in
a fedora, I must say--may be second
only to Bill Gates when it comes to
haughty treatment of minions, but do
Willie's employees sit on Thai temples
and proclaim their divinity? That's
apparently what happened to a
Microsoft programmer on vacation.
According to email making the rounds
among MSN and WebTV employees, the
young fellow (who didn't answer his
Redmond phone when my agents rang
him up) overheated his circuits,
perched himself atop an ancient Thai
temple for 10 hours, and told the
authorities he was God. It took
scaffolding and a special police
neck-hold to bring him down, according
to the report. Brutal, Juice, brutal!
Whether the item is true or not, it
produced some amusing comments as
it made its way through the outer
provinces of Lawrence Lessig's favorite
evil empire.
"So, um, how closely are we supposed
to try to blend into the Microsoft
culture?" mused one WebTV employee
as the tidbit made its way around the
company.
"I'm sure that each of us, at one time or
another, has had the experience of
waking up in some God-forsaken
tropical paradise and feeling that
horrible falling sensation that comes
from being separated from your desk
and workstation," wrote another
Webhead.