From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 95 17:37:01 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: a hole in PGP
Message-ID: <v02120d06ac432493c978@[199.0.65.105]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 8:08 PM 7/31/95, Dr. Fred said:

>it is impractical to verify that there
>are no subtle back doors

Ah. I knew my undergraduate philosophy degree from good ol' Mizzou would
come in handy some day.  In the sophistry biz, the above is an informal
fallacy. It's called a disproving a negative, more popularly called the
"Flying Saucer" fallacy, as in, "prove to me that flying saucers (or PGP
trap-doors) don't exist".

I would put the rest of your rejoinder in the same class of tinker-toy
logic, Doc.

You're testing my patience. Feeling flush from my New Orleans road trip, I
went out and bought the commercial version of Eudora, filter-feature and
all, which means I'm just itching to test it. In other words, it means you
are flirting with the kill-file, the bozo-filter, more rudely, a
<plonk!ing>.

Play nice, Doc, or don't play at all.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga







-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
Shipwright Development Corporation, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131
USA (617) 323-7923
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
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