From: sidney@taurus.apple.com (Sidney Markowitz)
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 94 15:55:18 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: (fwd) Re: BSD random() - any good (source included)
Message-ID: <9407082252.AA21993@federal-excess.apple.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Jim Choate wants to hear from the silent majority before he'll believe that
a significant number of people were not interested in 65k of fortran code
and seeing the same message quoted 0, 1, 2, and 3 levels deep. (I thought
that was a really nice touch, even better than the Fortran code).

I'll add my two cents, and we'll see if we can get all 698 other people on
the list to respond. I won't be elitist and try to use statistics to prove
the point (As in, if 11 people bother to respond, 10 against and 1
supportive of the mailings, and there are 700 people subscribed to the
list, than what is the probability that there are at least 600 people who
not only aren't interested in having the stuff dropped in their mailbox,
but don't even want to waste time writing about it or waste other people's
time by have them read stuff about it.) After all, we saw how useless
simplified explanations of the relationship between breaking RSA and
factoring of large numbers were at convincing certain people in other
discussions, or reasoning about the uselessness of making keys that take
trillions of universe lifetimes to break instead of mere millions of years.

This discussion has been very useful to me. It got me to finally read up on
Eudora Mail's filtering facility, so now I know how to kill e-mail
automagically based on various specified criteria. Thank you, Jim. It's
always good to learn new things.

By the way, referring to a random number generator as "cryptoweak" does not
mean that it is somehow relevant to cryptography. A cryptoweak something is
a thing that is *not* useful for cryptography. Well, I suppose an article
on how cryptoweak RNGs could be used in a cryptographically strong system
would be of interest to this list, but so would an article on how Twinkies
and taco sauce could be used to create strong cryptography. But please
don't forward any usenet articles about Zippy's diet on the theory that
cypherpunks should be interested in it because of its strong
non-relationship to the purpose of this list.

 -- sidney <sidney@apple.com>