Re: Star Office 5.1

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> Al == Al Hudson <eah106 [at] york.ac.uk> writes:

Al> I wouldn't have thought this would apply in this case: SSL
Al> (which I presume is the function in question) is available in
Al> 48bit format? I was thinking more along the lines of it being
Al> built into windows pretty much as standard, whereas ssl on
Al> linux is not nearly as well developed.

48 bits? Surely you jest.... The cypherpunks will settle for nothing
less than 128 (I think; I am not a cypherpunk myself---I figure the
government will tap me at the source, why worry about the Internet?---
and I can imagine that initial authentication and data streams might
have different requirements).

As for well-developed, it's the US export restrictions that are the
reason it's not well-developed to a great extent. And this is a
serious business issue. I am sure that if it was just a matter of
grabbing it off the net, Sun would be very happy to take it, make a
version that was robust enough for their purposes, and incorporate it
in Star Office, even if they had to make a separate proxy process
(like Netscape's DNS service, which is separate to deal with the
stupid POSIX gethostby* is blocking standard---Jamie Zawinski's rant
on that is just precious!) to deal with free license restrictions.

And there are a lot of European governments that are more than happy
to play along, because they don't want their citizens having strong
encryption.

I know that the guys who do Stronghold (a secure Apache variant) find
the US export restrictions a massive PITA. It could be that Sun just
haven't gotten around to dealing with the export license issue yet;
they've only owned SO for a few months at this point. I wouldn't be
at all surprised if any license the previous developers had couldn't
be transferred, and that other licenses Sun might have don't apply---
we're talking about the legal equivalent of thermonuclear bomb
technology, you know. Aaaargh!

So your strong-crypto browser will have a little mushroom cloud logo
that expands to indicate network activity....

--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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