From: Pete Loshin <pete@loshin.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 09:13:00 +0800
To: "'ota+@transarc.com>
Subject: RE: No FV supporters?
Message-ID: <01BAEF34.AA95ECC0@ploshin.tiac.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Nathaniel seems to be defending his cause sufficiently well, 
and graciously answering the abuse.  Some of the abusers 
are showing a fairly comprehensive lack of knowledge of the 
FV system.

I would venture to say that FV has no more profit motivation
than, say, Netscape--or how about Open Market?  They who
gleefully opened a "Here are the secure servers that haven't 
been hacked" page some time ago.  That was pretty self-
serving, wasn't it?

Nor would I consider the FV brouhaha much more obvious
than, say, the front page announcements about "NFS and 
RPC considered dangerous" that hit the big papers last year.
The weaknesses of those protocols for internetworking have
long been known to those working with TCP/IP.

Now, clearly there are lots of opinions on FV's system, but
if people like Sameer and Rich Salz (e.g., who have reputations
as knowledgeable and aware) are going to trash FV it
would mean a lot more to many readers if they could state
more specifically what it is about FV that doesn't work (or that
doesn't work as well as, say, SSL or CyberCash or Open 
Market's approaches).

As for the Weld Pond/et al graphical clicking approaches,
they may work and they may defend against some attacks, 
but I won't use it (too much clicking around, too likely to 
make mistakes) and neither will anyone without a GUI.

My $0.02.

-Pete Loshin
 pete@loshin.com

Ted Anderson wrote:

>I am rather shocked that after wading through hundreds of msgs of abuse
>of Nathaniel and FV I haven't seen one message of support; but perhaps I
>missed it.

etc.