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Phil Zimmermann Talk Summary And Audio
Ames Cornish writes "Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, spoke
on Security and Privacy to a standing-room-only crowd in San Francisco on July 31st. There is a short
summary and audio recording of the event on the
Software Development Forum site. Phil talked about
Dmitry Sklyarov, Nicodemo Scarfo,
Phil's own experience as the victim of US government persecution, and how automatic weapons were involved in the attempt to get export permission for PGP." The MP3 is at the bottom of the page.
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* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
This is some really shitty programming by whoever does this... Plus, judging from other comments, the editors have taken to deleting posts.
Delete this!
A couple of hours ago I posted some "This is not phrist coast" bullshit in one of these "soon to be posted" stories (which are supossed to be hidden). One minute later, there is a response to it, asking "Why Do you have to predate stories that haven't even been posted yet?". My reply was "Just to prove that it is possible to beat the system and because I am fed up with the new slashcode hype".
Guess what? The whole thing is gone now. Moreover, someone made a comment about my post saying "Nice, we have some Euro-moron disrupting here". Now my question is: how did the poster know I was an "Euro-moron" unless he could check the host from which the post was made?.
Pretty intriguing if you ask me
i just poured hot grits down my pants.
brrr!
an alyson hannigan
yum yum
He's gay. But with that name, everyone knows already.
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
Linux' cost consists not only of the frequent updates, which require new cdrom's to be bought if you don't have a high speed Internet connection.
Another factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
The upcoming 'solution' to this, EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
thank you.
(Grabbed before the inevitable Slashdot effect.)
At the inaugural Internet Security and Privacy event, Philip Zimmermann, the creator of the world's most popular email encryption software, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), spoke to a standing-room-only audience in San Francisco. A decade ago, the Federal government accused Phil of violating the Arms Export Control Act for munitions trafficking. The government claimed that U.S. national security was jeopardized when PGP was spread around the world as free encryption software. The investigation of Phil Zimmermann continued for three years. The feds eventually dropped their case.
Phil spoke about the current Dmitry Sklyarov case. Dmitry is a Russian programmer who was thrown in jail by the federal government at the behest of Adobe. Adobe claims that software Dmitry created for his employer in Russia violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After meetings with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Adobe had a change of heart and asked the feds to drop criminal charges against Dmitry. Phil characterized criminal law as a "blunt instrument" when used to enforce encryption software policies. Phil also related to the terror of having the federal government threaten you with incarceration for writing a piece of code.
Phil went on to discuss another current criminal case, that against Nicodemo S. Scarfo, in which the FBI used electronic eavesdropping to access data which Mr. Scarfo had reportedly encrypted with PGP. While the FBI had a search warrant, Phil believes law enforcement should be held to the higher wire-tap standards before permitting on-going electronic surveillance.
Phil also had a number of stories to tell about the development of PGP and his efforts to get permission to export that software. Only one episode involved the brandishing of automatic weapons in a bank building, however.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Wanna have sex?????
luv,
SexiTeen!
Yeah, but was it a pansy-ass MAC-11, or was it a true crew-served heavy automatic weapon like a M2 Browning or Mk19?
Big difference.
Which proves Netscape is the better browser.
There's an article (one of two) on the Linux Journal website about GNU Privacy Guard for PGP functionality for us *NIX folks.
-yb
Interesting to note that an .asp site is surviving this quite successfully. I never thought I'd see the day IIS held up to the /. effect, but there it is...
A cup of hot grits? A bowl? A bucket? How could you leave out this important bit of information?
If they really are moving equipment in, I'd say Slashdot's editorial credibility is shot.
You all should stop downloading that mp3. Its making my download slow down.
thanks.
If you provided a valid email address. Otherwise, ignorance is bliss...
In any case, let's be glad he doesn't sing on it, or else the RIAA would come after him, too.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
Also, some retarded distributors (like Redhat) set the Fixed-width font to Helvetica by default, which of course is not fixed-width at all.
Let's keep this hush-hush. For example, no more bug reports about it to sourceforge, OK?
I swear to you all that this is true. The following email was just submitted to the Portland Oregon Free Sklyarov email list:
The latest domain name extension has arrived .SEX!!! It's the fresh ,new,
exciting web address that is taking the world by storm.
Who wants to be .com when you can now be .SEX
Register your .SEX domain name today exclusively at: [pr0n link deleted]
With this addition I can see his cause getting MAJOR "exposure" now.
I sent a very nice, polite bug report saying that the URLs are broken in w3m, since for some stupid reason they left the 'http:' off the beginning of all the intra-site URLs, i.e. '//slashdot.org/users.pl' instead of 'http://slashdot.org/users.pl'. But instead of taking the 5 seconds it would take to fix this, they just say "Sorry, your browser's broken, we aren't going to fix it." I find it terribly ironic that they get all up-in-arms whenever a new version of Microsoft Whatever breaks compatibility with anything, but don't care the slightest bit when they do the exact same thing. Disgusting.
People who are concerned about the UN taking over their countries or usurping the authority of the country should also be pointing their concern towards the US's mega corporations. As free enterprise as I am, the bigger businesses seem to own major portions of some countries and specifically major portions of their governments.
Maybe it's time to start throttling campaign funding from corporations, as much as that's a 1st amendment issue as well.
There has to be a middle ground here.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
and what is the response?
"We know that they are guilty because they were convicted of the crime, and we have no interest in helping a guilty man go free"
I have seen this on the news several times over the past few months. You can see the logic of it all. It is blind and arbitrary conviction to "principles" unencumbered by the thought process.
Now we transfer this to other areas of Law enforcement, and we can see how the lack of education and sheer strupidity can lead to the legal situations we face in the technology arena.
Yes, some of these people are in fact stupid, and to fix the problem would take several years of experience and education that you happen to have, but they don't.
- - -
Radio Free Nation
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OK, PGP is good software, it's a revolution, blah blah blah. All true. No questions.
It's also true that the US government investigated Phil Zimmerman quite extensively, and considered what to do about him. This went on several years.
However unless things have changed since I last got up to speed on things, Zimmerman was never prosecuted. No charges were laid, no time was served, no record was created. Phil is and always has been a free man without a criminal record (at least as a result of PGP). Is this wrong? Have things changed?
I'm not saying that he didn't go through a nasty few years, and that it was all stupid, but he shouldn't be treated like a saint. For that matter, neither should his side of the story be taken entirely at face value. Remember, there _is_ another side, even if the government won't/can't talk about it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Phil is a funny guy. Take for example the way he lists his phone number online.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
CmdrMalda is gay
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
The suffix "-ful" is applied to nouns to turn them into adjectives. "Beauty"+"ful" = "beautiful", "Insight"+"ful" = "insightful", "Hope"+"ful" = "hopeful", etc. "Incite" is a verb. Would you say "eatful", "smellful", or "walkful"? Don't you see that "inciteful" looks just as stupid?
My memory of the talk at SDForum...
The PGP guys were getting around export restrictions by printing the code on paper, which they distributed at a crypto group meeting, with the old nudge nudge wink wink type of intention (somebody sent it overseas? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you). So here they are, purposefully handing it out in this very public forum, as a CYOA move trying to legitimize the distribution. And later in the meeting, some guy pops up with a big duffel bag, and announces the gun SIG will be meeting next week for some shooting or something, and unzips the bag and pulls out some kind of automatic rifle, mortifying Phil and crew. Better yet, the meeting was being held on the 15th floor of a bank, so if the guy had been caught walking into the building, well, you do the math... Would've been wonderful to be a fly on the wall that day...
ehintz
I don't know my automatic weapons all that well, but I think it had been an AR-15. It was entertaining to watch the reactions in the room when [pseudonym-deleted] got it out.
There wasn't any nudge-nudge-wink-wink about the distribution - it was more of a "please take one if you've got some suitable overseas contacts to mail it to."
Yet nother crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD hs lost more market share, this news srves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick nd its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For ll practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BS is dying
This is MOST informative.
Unfortunately this probably IS the reason why it is all messed up.
Law Enforcement without justice is arbitrary, and is a greased skid to dictatorship (pick you favorite)
It is a blind spot that is likely the achilles heal of our world. This is _exactly_ what is going on with the DCMA, the MPAA, the RIAA, etc.
Law Enforcement, not Justice.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I am the real Anne Tomlinson, but I guess I can't even post on slashdot now without my posts being deleted. Maybe this one will stay up since I'm posting as AC.
Has a nice history of PGP.