From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 12:33:09 +0800
To: Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>
Subject: Re: Macintosh Mixmaster port...  Who's doing it?
Message-ID: <3.0b19.32.19960922162606.006c1644@ricochet.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 03:16 PM 9/22/96 -0500, Adam Shostack wrote:

>	A real Mac port of Mixmaster, that integrated with Claris
>EMailer and Eudora would be a huge boon to the millions of Mac users
>out there.  I have no doubt that Vinnie's mac crypto conference talked
>a lot about this sort of thing.

Actually, the Mac crypto conference didn't spend any time at all on
Mixmaster - which is not intended as a criticism of either the conference
or of Mixmaster, but it just didn't happen. 

I gave a very short talk and said that I thought the Mac needed three apps,
for people who wanted to jump in a write something useful to the cause of
privacy on the net and didn't want to reinvent any wheels: a remailer
client with a good user interface, a Mac-native remailer, and an
implementation of DC-nets. Mixmaster would, of course, address two of those
three. Lucky tells me that there is already a Mac implementation of
DC-nets, but it doesn't seem to be very well known.

My impression of the demographics of the conference was that it was folks
who are mostly working developers who aren't necessarily up-to-the minute
on crypto and ecommerce stuff, but are interested enough to at least think
about including it in their applications.

I'm pottering around with a Java-based remailer that acts like a POP client
so it can run on a client machine, not a Unix box; but other people should
take that as a challenge to see if they can finish one before/better than
me, not a reason to avoid writing one. Hal Finney has already done some
very nice work with Java and mailing; see his home page (the address of
which I don't have immediately at hand) for more details. 

For what it's worth, I think future remailer/Mixmaster development might do
well in Java. I'm not especially sold on or trusting of the alleged
security or trustability features of Java (sorry, no offense) but I *do*
think it's a neat tool for building non-machine specific network aware
applications. Ignore the fact that people use it to build silly animations
or that downloadaded applets may or may not be secure - it's still useful
as a development tool.

--
Greg Broiles                |  "We pretend to be their friends,
gbroiles@netbox.com         |   but they fuck with our heads."
http://www.io.com/~gbroiles |
                            |