From: merriman@metronet.com (David K. Merriman)
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 94 11:50:09 PST
To: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Subject: Re: "You aren't following the _rules_!"
Message-ID: <199411291950.AA02745@metronet.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Jonathan Rochkind replied:

>At 3:58 AM 11/29/94
Lucky Green wrote:
>>I do not mean to belittle the work that has been done
but unless the
>>encryption is built into the mailer and using a remailer means clicking the
>>"use  X remailer(s)" button
and the mailer better know which ones are
>>working and do the PGP envelopes
it won't happen.
>
>Have you used premail?  It pretty much does all of that.
>People still aren't using premail
either because they can't figure out how
>to install it (doubtful
it's not hard to install)
or because they don't
>have a need for it that's great enough to justify the (minimal) time
>neccesary to ftp it and install it
or wait the (sometimes more painful)
>time neccesary for the computer to encrypt and/or sign your outgoing
>messages.

This brings up a point that I - among others - have to flog every now and
then: the *x-centric nature of most of the net. I have no doubt that premail
works wonders - but I don't know of any version of it that would run on my
MS-DOS box
a Mac
an Amiga
etc. I use PC Eudora for email
and have pinged on QualComm every so often to ask when the commercial
version will allow/support external encryption programs. As some may have
noticed over the weekend
I also started trying to use the PGP Tools package to try and write a
PGP.DLL. For various reasons (mostly me :-)
it's going to be more difficult and take longer than I thought - but I am
*not* going to give up on it. Until/unless there exists fairly
easy-to-implement means of including crypto for applications programmers on
a variety of platforms other than *x boxes
progress in the click-a-button-to-encrypt area is going to be bloody slow.

>
>Because premail makes it incredibly easy to use PGP on a unix box. And
for
>that matter
the Eudora/PGP applescritps make it incredibly easy to use PGP
>on a mac.  And there are some people working on an applescript that will
>automate using remailers on a mac too.    But ease of use appearantly isn't
>enough; no matter how easy it gets to use
it's still going to have some
>cost to the user over not using it. Even if the cost is only having to wait
>the 1.5 seconds it takes your machine to decrypt/encrypt a message.  Unless
>there's a use for it
people won't be willing to spend that 1.5 seconds per
>message.

This kinda supports my previous observations: the necessity of adding
external scripts and such to the Mac version of Eudora slows down the
program's operation more than necessary. If there were a Mac resource (of
whatever kind - I'm not Mac-fluent) that the nice folks over at QualComm
could use to build crypto into the program to start with
then they wouldn't have the excuse of "we can't because there's nothing to
do it with at the source level".

My ha-penny's worth....

Dave Merriman


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