Re: Apple crypto engineer position available

[Mark Altenberg <mark@altenberg.com>]

On 4/14/98, Robert Hettinga blathered on like this:

>...Hint 1: Whatsisname Sidhu,
>
>who negotiated the world's first RSA license, and who probably could have
>invented digital commerce on the internet all by himself if he only knew
>what he had, already bought and paid for, wasted in a mail and LAN
>protocol, buried in the bowels of the MacOS...

>...Anyway, a more clueful Sidhu, (who, to be fair, couldn't have understood
>what was coming) could have, with just a little of the right prompting :-),
>taken some of the money you guys gave to, say, Steve, for instance :-), and
>bought the blind signature patent at firesale prices from DigiCash ($10
>million is chump change, even to Apple, even then, :-)) at last year's
>greater-fools exchange of ownership at "the world's greatest financial
>cryptography company" (my name, not theirs)....
>

Quite amazing to look at all of the innovation that went on at Apple and
wonder what could have been. From my perspective, the big mistake with
Apple's first implementation of crypto was that it was part of an
architecture (yep, PowerTalk). After close encounters with this and other
wonderfully "flexible architectures", I've learned (the hard way) that this
is one of the best oxymorons in computerdom. Architectures seem like
wonderful, grandiose ways to solve a bunch of problems at once, but they
usually lead a Titanic-like existence, eventually sinking into the abyss
and taking almost everything with it, including products, businesses,
reputations - you name it.

Well, an amazing thing happened. Just before PowerTalk started taking on
serious water, someone managed to throw DigiSign (Apple's digital signature
technology based on RSA public keys) into its own life boat; Apple actually
built a separate library for DigiSign that didn't require PowerTalk. But,
unfortunately, there was leak in this boat, too. You see, the model for
DigiSign's certificates was based on a heirarchy and required a certificate
authority and all of the requisite infrastructure. No one had really done
this yet so Apple had to do more than create DigiSign and put it into the
Mac OS - they had to get this infrastructure in place, too.

Now, even though Apple had the help of RSA and BBN, there was this even
bigger problem of just helping people get it. The best way to help people
understand technology is to make it accessible so almost anyone can play
with it and use it. This is what Apple is known for - making technology so
accessible that people just go nuts, doing things with it and taking it
places no one ever dreamed. That's how Apple catalyzed the transformation
of the publishing industry. Requiring a CA to make DigiSign work simply
made this impossible. A peer to peer model, allowing people to create and
sign their own certificates would have been far more appropriate for
Apple's creative users.  Then came PGP...

C 'est la vie!

Mark
----
mark@altenberg.com