From: Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 14:13:40 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Australian banks using uncracakble IDEA!
Message-ID: <312e1ae944182fdff692ebfb31299567@anon.efga.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain





                     Conflicting agendas cloud
                     accord on internet trading

                            By John Davidson 

http://www.afr.com.au/content/971110/inform/inform3.html

Banks will lose their shirts; retailers will go bust if the import tax
threshold isn't lowered; retailers will go bust if the threshold isn't
raised; individuals will be monitored by a person or persons
unknown; the Tax Office will kill it first, or maybe it won't. 

These are just some of the often strange and always contradictory
claims heard by the Joint Parliamentary Committee of Public
Accounts during the Sydney leg of its inquiry into internet commerce
last week. 
[...]
One expert witness, who said he had been involved in the
establishment of the internet more than 20 years ago, testified that
internet commerce should be banned because the speed and
security of the network had barely improved in the last decade. 

Modem speeds, said Richard Marschall from Marschall Acoustics,
were still limited to 9600bps (contrary to the claims of ISPs and
modem makers, which offer speeds of around 50kbps) and using the
internet was still grossly inefficient compared to putting a disk in
the post. 

Worse, 90 per cent of all internet bandwidth was used to (slowly,
one presumes) download pornography. 

Claims that the internet could be used for serious business were
also grossly inflated, he said. 

Dr Marschall said that any banks that chose to use the internet for
commerce would "lose their shirts" because the security of the
internet was so poor. 

The cryptography relied on by banks to scramble data on the public
network could readily be cracked, he said, because law enforcement
agencies refused to let people use strong versions of the software
for fear of it falling into the hands of criminals. 

(Those Australian banks that offer Web banking sites do, in fact,
use a strong form of cryptography known as IDEA, which is thought
to be effectively uncrackable.) 

"The internet (is) an ideal media (sic) for fraud and other unethical
practices," he said in his submission. 

"It is not clear if there is any fix for these problems -- short of
pulling the plug and banning internet commerce. Commercial
transactions were banned for the first 15 years of the internet's
existence for precisely these reasons."