On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 23:34:45 -0500, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tuesday 16 January 2007 11:47, Bruno Wolff III wrote: > > [...] > > >Strong encryption is a different issue. They have pretty much given up > > on directly outlawing it (though the government did drop the case > > against DJB before they lost again at the supreme court). > > Which they would have (lost that is), and that would have left a lot of > people with egg on their faces. And more importantly it would have been a lot harder to threaten other people once the Supremes ruled it was OK. Now they can still threaten people with expensive court cases if someone publishes something they don't like. > > > What they > > seem to be doing now is putting pressure on businesses not to provide > > strong encryption for the masses. Especially in telephony. There is > > some reason that end to end encryption isn't standard in digital > > phones. > > That, from an engineering standpoint, is far more likely to be a > consideration of latency and power consumption than in the difficulty of > doing it. Strong encryption is both power hungry, and slow. No one > would long tolerate a cellphone that only had 15 minutes talk time, and > wasted 2-3 seconds for each turnaround in the conversation and cost $50 > more than one without it because of the royalty payments such a device > might incur. We are all too darned used to the instantainious(sp) nature > of the analog phone. It wouldn't be that bad. There are crypto systems that wouldn't need royalties. I expect that you could have a system that couldn't be broken in real time that wouldn't add significant latency with today's hardware. > > Even skype's delays bug the heck out of me. And people here are talking about not using SELinux because they don't trust them. I would be much more worried about Skype.
