From: Eric Young <eay@mincom.oz.au>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 95 17:51:03 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Netscape security
In-Reply-To: <9508211902.AA19391@couchey.inria.fr>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950822102640.19364A-100000@orb>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On Mon, 21 Aug 1995, Damien Doligez wrote:
> >From: altitude@cic.net (Alex Tang)
> >It seems that one of the problems with Damien's
> >cracking job was that it  was "not sanctioned".
>
> Actually, INRIA's PR people are quite pleased with the publicity.
> They asked me to prepare an official press release to counteract the
> Wall Street Journal's "evil hacker" story, which was unfortunately
> reprinted by some papers.  The Herald Tribune is particularly bad in
> this respect.

Yes, this is all quite silly.  For my part, I've implemented SSL on my 
work machines (in my own time) and released it under my own copyright
and my boses don't mind (mind you, I'm not trying to make money from the 
code).  I've participated in trying to break the 40bit 
key on work machines (using only idle machines) and they don't mind.  
I've run network raytracing programs (using only idle machines) and they 
don't mind.  Most places of work give employees quite a bit of lattitude 
as long as they don't do things that reflect badly on the company and if it 
generates publicity that is positive they don't mind.  If Joe Bloggs who 
works at Widgets Inc get's mentioned in the paper, thats free publicity 
for Widgets Inc and indicates that Widgets Inc may have some-one with 
some brain cells working for them (depending if they call Joe Bloggs an 
'evil hacker' or not :-).

eric
--
Eric Young                  | Signature removed since it was generating
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