Re: NYT on Internet Flaws

[cman@communities.com (Douglas Barnes)]

As I pointed out to Ian on Sunday, this is a very old,
very well-known bug. As I also pointed out, it is a well-
understood fact about Internet security as it stands today
that if you can't trust the people on your subnet, you're
screwed. I also mentioned the facts that have been mentioned
by others on this list (firewalls, most home users don't use
NFS, etc.)

It is profoundly irritating to find this splashed on the
front page of the NYT, contributing to the FUD that
largely benefits luddites like First Virtual and
those, like MS$, pushing for a return to proprietary networks.
(One quote from FV marketing director Pierre Wolfe at the ML
conference I recently attended, "The Internet may end up
as a ghetto, where people are afraid to engage in commercial
activity.")

Furthermore, neither the original post or the NYT article
place any blame on the role of government regulation or
greedy patent-holders in disrupting the formation of protocols
based on strong cryptography, which are two of the major culprits
in this matter.