Re: Star Office 5.1

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> 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
>
> 48 bits? Surely you jest....

I was more referring to the absence of *any* crypto; it's *possible* to do
48-bit crypto without infringing laws. The point I was trying to make was,
laws or no laws, there would probably be other reasons as well why Star
haven't put SSL in Linux SO.

> 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.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you about the importance of strong crypto.

> 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.

Mmmm, to an extent. I think the cat is probably out of the bag with PGP,
GPGP, etc...

> 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!

Yes, you're probably right there - but I would think that if you can
download a windows version that does SSL, the obvious answer is to make
crypto a default part of linux: i.e, have it there as standard, as windows
must do. Then Sun just has to hook into the linuxcryptolib or whatever..
heh, 'just', I think I 'just' assumed a lot there . . . ;)

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

I heard as well, on similar lines, that some of the up-coming games
consoles will need export licenses because of their 100MIPS+ power or
whatever.. I have a feeling those export laws aren't going to last five
years. Or, at least, I would hope not!

Cheers,

Alex.

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