Sample TBTF, just FYI

[mod at std.com (Michael O'Donnell)]

As long as I'm touting newsletters, here's another, and
IMHO it's rather better than EDUPAGE.  So, I include (below)
a sample copy of the most recent issue of TBTF (Tasty Bits
from the Technology Front) on the assumption (again) that
those here gathered might find it of interest.  I have no
involvement with TBTF other than as a subscriber.


Regards,
 ---------------------------------
 Michael O'Donnell     mod at std.com
 ---------------------------------


########### BEGIN SAMPLE TBTF


 TBTF for 1999-05-22: Hush

     T a s t y   B i t s   f r o m   t h e   T e c h n o l o g y   F r o n t

     Timely news of the bellwethers in computer and communications
     technology that will affect electronic commerce -- since 1994

     Your Host: Keith Dawson

     This issue: < http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-05-22.html >
     ________________________________________________________________________

 C o n t e n t s

     HushMail: free Web-based email with bulletproof encryption
     ICANN increasingly under fire
     Good news and bad news from Europe
         EU reverses course, won't ban caching
         EU passes mandatory Net wiretap regulation
     Canada will not regulate the Net
     Domain-name competition? Not yet
     Live from Linux Expo
     Chicken Little was right
     ________________________________________________________________________

 ..HushMail: free Web-based email with bulletproof encryption

   Now refugees can email in safety from Internet cafes

     Hush Communications has quietly begun beta testing a significant
     development in email privacy.  HushMail [1] works like Hotmail or
     Rocketmail -- you can set up multiple free accounts and access them
     from any Web browser anywhere -- but when you email another HushMail
     user your communication is protected by unbreakable en- cryption.
     The crypto, implemented in a downloadable Java applet, was developed
     outside of US borders and so has no export limita- tions.

     Here are the FAQ [2] and a more technical overview [3] of the Hush-
     Mail system.

     HushMail public and private keys are 1024 bits long, and are stored
     on a server located in Canada.  All information sent between the
     HushApplet and the HushMail server is encrypted via the Blowfish
     symmetric 128-bit algorithm.  The key to this symmetric pipe is ran-
     domly generated each session by the server and is transferred to
     the client machine over a secure SSL connection.  When I posted news
     of HushMail to the Cryptography list, the moderator questioned the
     wis- dom of storing keys on a remote server, and several posters
     (none from Hush) have provided the rationale.  You can follow the
     discus- sion here [4].

     When you sign on as a new user you can choose an anonymous account
     or an identifiable one.  For the latter you have to fill out a dem-
     ographic profile, to make you more attractive (in the aggregate) to
     HushMail's advertisers.  The HushApplet walks you through generating
     a public-private key-pair.  The process is fun and slick as a smelt.
     You need to come up with a secure pass-phrase, and in this process
     HushMail gives only minimal guidance.  You might want to visit
     Arnold Reinhold's Diceware page [5], which lays out a foolproof
     passphrase protocol utilizing a pair of dice.

     HushMail relies heavily on Java (JVM 1.1.5 or higher), so it can
     only be used with the latest browsers.  For Netscape, version 4.5 or
     4.6 is best; the earliest workable version is 4.04, and some fea-
     tures don't work before 4.07.  For Internet Explorer, 4.5 is rec-
     ommended, but the latest Windows release of IE 4.0 (sub-version
     4.72.3110) works as well.  Red Hat Linux version 5.2 is also tested
     and supported.  Unfortunately, HushMail does not work on Macintoshes,
     due to limitations in Apple's Java implementation.  (Mac users can
     crawl HushMail under Connectix Virtual PC.  Note that I don't say
     "run."  I've tried this interpretation-under-emulation and do not
     recommend it.)  The company is trying urgently to connect with the
     right people at Apple to get this situation remedied.

     One of the limitations of this early release of HushMail is that
     en- cryption can only be used to and from another HushMail account.
     It is not currently possible to export your public/private key-pair,
     to set up automatic forwarding of mail sent to a HushMail account, or
     to import non-Hush public keys.  I spoke with Cliff Baltzley, Hush's
     CEO and chief technical wizard.  He stresses that Hush's desire and
     intention is to move toward interoperability with other players
     in the crypto world, such as PGP and S/MIME.  The obstacles to
     doing so are the constraints on technical resources (read: offshore
     crypto programmers) and legal questions of intellectual property.
     Baltzley believes that HushMail's positive impact on privacy
     worldwide will be enhanced by maximizing the product's openness.

     [1]  https://www.hushmail.com/
     [2]  https://www.hushmail.com/faq.htm
     [3]  https://www.hushmail.com/tech_description.htm
     [4]  http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography at c2.net/index.html
     [5]  http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
     ____________

 ..ICANN increasingly under fire

   Diverse critics voice concern about the organization's sewardship
   of domain names

     Complaints are building about the way ICANN, the organization
     tasked with guiding Internet naming and numbering from government
     to private oversight, is pursuing its charter.  This Telepolis
     article [6] summarizes some of the concerns.  Here are three
     separate controversies that have arisen in recent days in
     advance of ICANN's next meeting in Berlin, scheduled for 26 May.

     - A number of domain-name activists have petitioned [7] ICANN
       and the US Department of Commerce protesting ICANN's inten-
       tion to consider, at the Berlin meeting, a trademark reso-
       lution report [8] from the World Intellectual Property
       Organization. The petition argues that ICANN's charter gives
       it no power to implement such a far-reaching power shift as
       the WIPO proposal calls for; the current unelected ICANN
       members are supposed to limit themselves to the transition
       to a permanent ICANN with elected representation. Here is a
       response [9] from the US Small Business Administration to
       the petition, and here are WIPO representative Michael Froom-
       kin's comments [10] on the final WIPO report.

     - Recently Ellen Rony, coauthor of The Domain Name Handbook and
       one of the signatories to [7], posted a note [11] requesting
       that ICANN make stronger provisions for input and participa-
       tion via the Internet, instead of answering all critics with
       the less-than-helpful (and quite expensive) suggestion that
       they come to Berlin.

     - The people who run the country-code top-level domains around
       the world are unhappy with ICANN for a variety of reasons.
       One of the principals of Adams Names, which handles regis-
       tration for five island ccTLDs, posted a note to the wwTLD
       mailing list (not online as far as I have been able to dis-
       cover) detailing how the official representative from the
       Turks and Caicos Islands was denied admission to the Ber-
       lin ICANN meeting on the grounds that T & C is not a country,
       but a colony. (The islands are in fact a British Overseas
       Territory with their own democratically elected government.)
       Ant Brooks <ant at hivemind dot com> sent this summary [12]
       of the ccTLD community's complaints with ICANN; it is posted
       on the TBTF archive by permission.

     [6]  http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/2837/1.html
     [7]  http://www.interesting-people.org/199905/0044.html
     [8]  http://wipo2.wipo.int/process/eng/final_report.html
     [9]  http://www.interesting-people.org/199905/0076.html
     [10] http://www.law.miami.edu/~amf/commentary.htm
     [11] http://www.interesting-people.org/199905/0073.html
     [12] http://tbtf.com/resource/brooks-ccTLD.html
     ____________

 ..Good news and bad news from Europe

     ..EU reverses course, won't ban caching

     TBTF for 1999-03-26 [13] reported on an EU proposal, backed by music
     copyright interests, that would have banned caching of Internet data
     in Europe. On 13 May the EU inserted a critical nine-word amendment
     into the Report on Copyright in the Information Society that appears
     to lift the threat of imminent European Internet molasses. The amendm-
     ent reads: "...including those which facilitate effective functioning
     of transmission systems..." [14].

     [13] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-03-26.html#s02
     [14] http://www.theregister.co.uk/990521-000016.html
     ____________

     ..EU passes mandatory Net wiretap regulation

     TBTF for 1999-05-08 [15] noted the European movement towards a US
     CALEA-style requirement. With little scrutiny and in a nearly empty
     chamber on a Friday afternoon, the European Parliament passed a
     regulation that would require European ISPs to provide full real-
     time access to law enforcement for Internet, telephony, and wire-
     less traffic, with the cost to be borne by ISPs and other communi-
     cations carriers [16].

     [15] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-05-08.html#s01
     [16] http://www.europemedia.com/emeu/18_May_1999.shtml
     ____________

 ..Canada will not regulate the Net

   The civilization to the north shows us how it should be done

     The minister of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications
     Commission, equivalent to the US FCC, announced that CTRC will not
     regulate new media over the Internet [17]. Francoise Bertrand's mes-
     sage was so sensible and straightforward as to make grown men weep
     in such benighted backwaters as the US, Australia [18], and the Euro-
     pean Union. "By not regulating, we hope to support the growth of new
     media services in Canada," said Bertrand. "Our message is clear. We
     are not regulating any portion of the Internet."

     [17] http://www.crtc.gc.ca/ENG/NEWS/RELEASES/1999/R990517e.htm
     [18] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-05-08.html#s04
     ____________

 ..Domain-name competition? Not yet

   NSI still claims ownership of the Whois database, and acts
   like it

     Esther Dyson is the chair of ICANN, the entity chartered with moving
     control of Internet naming and numbering out from under the purview
     of the US government. Dave Winer interviewed her by email [19] and
     here is what she has to say about competition in the granting of do-
     main names.

       We haven't created competition for NSI in toto, but for the
       service of registering domain names -- i.e. its registrar
       business. NSI still maintains the database (the registry),
       but does so under a price cap (which may be further reduced
       in negotiations between NSI and the Department of Commerce).

     The reality is that four weeks after the competition starting gun
     fired, none of the five companies participating in the first phase
     of ICANN's process is yet selling names in competition with NSI
     [20]. Some are still negotiating with NSI over the terms of their
     agreements. A particular sticking point is NSI's requirement that
     each new registrar take out $100,000 of liability insurance, pay-
     able to NSI under what one company described as "very liberal"
     terms. The chairman of the Internet Council of Registrars said,
     "NSI has taken all the liability that has previously existed for
     the registry and passed it back to the registrars."

     Here is an interview [21] with the CEO of another of the new regis-
     trars, Register.com. He is all understated discretion.

     Meanwhile the Justice Department is expanding its two-year antitrust
     probe into NSI [22], looking in particular at its recent stewardship
     of the Whois database [23].

     [19] http://davenet.userland.com/1999/05/whoOwnsDotCom
     [20] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,36117,00.html
     [21] http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990506S0021
     [22] http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,36116,00.html
     [23] http://tbtf.com/archive/1999-03-26.html#s01
     ____________

 ..Live from Linux Expo

   David Sklar reports from what has become a Big Show

     For the second year, David Sklar <sklar at student dot net> is
     feeding TBTF readers color commentary from Linux Expo in Raleigh,
     NC, USA. This report was filed Friday 21 May at 14:16 EDT (-0400).

       Checking in from the "e-mail garden" here.

       The show is definitely much bigger and snazzier than last
       year -- the location (Raleigh Convention Ctr. vs. Duke's
       campus) is a big part plus the exhibitors -- a huge booth
       from IBM (with some really comfy super-plush carpeting) plus
       HP, Compaq, Oracle, etc. Curiously, Sun only has a little
       booth on the fringes of the room. Lots of cool freebies and
       giveaways in the exhibit hall. I think the coolest are the
       lollipops that LinuxCare is giving away -- they have a real
       cricket inside them. I think the LinuxCare line about them
       is something like "These are open source lollipops -- you
       can see the bugs."

       My favorite part so far was the technical keynote from Jim
       Gettys yesterday. He talked mostly about design decisions in
       [the X Window System] and how they can help promote GUI
       standardization today. Towards the beginning, he mentioned
       that a particular feature in some window managers enables
       easy ways to abstract input devices and showed a 7-year old
       (but still supercool) video demo using voice input to X.
       Miguel DeIcaza, the GNOME guy, was sitting in the front row
       and yelled out that GNOME would have the feature that Jim
       was talking about "by tomorrow." Shortly before Jim finished
       his talk, the GNOME guys interrupted to say that they had
       added the feature while he was talking. Jim laughed and said
       that he had been bugging them for a month and a half to add
       it, and Miguel replied, to much laughter, that it was the
       video that really convinced him.

       Tonight is the Linux Bowl trivia challenge, which should be
       fun.
     ____________

 ..Chicken Little was right

   Global warming is cooling and shrinking the upper atmosphere

     Lloyd Wood, satellite maven, forwarded this bit from the New Sci-
     entist [24]. As the lower atmosphere heats due to the greenhouse
     effects caused by human activity, the upper layers of the atmos-
     phere cool down. This is happening at a rate far faster than had
     been predicted 10 years ago. The cooling in the stratosphere con-
     tributes directly to the ozone hole over Antartica, and is expected
     to open up a similar hole over the Arctic any year now; Greenland
     and northern Europe will bear the brunt of the effects of the in-
     creased solar radiation reaching the earth's surface. As the upper
     atmosphere cools it shrinks, many satellites orbiting in the layer
     known as the thermosphere, above 90 km, will find themselves reg-
     istering less air resistance as the atmosphere literally falls
     away below them. This effect will throw off current calculations
     of satellite longevity in orbit.

     [24] http://www.newscientist.com/ns/19990501/chillinthe.html
     ________________________________________________________________________

 N o t e s

 > TBTF will welcome its 10,000th email subscriber probably on Monday or
     Tuesday. Of course this subscriber will, if willing, be subjected
     to unexpected net.fame and the glare of publicity. I would grate-
     fully entertain any further suggestions for appropriate pomp and
     ceremony.
     ________________________________________________________________________

 S o u r c e s

 > For a complete list of TBTF's (mostly email) sources, see
     http://tbtf.com/sources.html .
     ________________________________________________________________________

     TBTF home and archive at http://tbtf.com/ . To (un)subscribe send
     the message "(un)subscribe" to tbtf-request at tbtf.com. TBTF is Copy-
     right 1994-1999 by Keith Dawson, <dawson at world.std.com>. Commercial
     use prohibited. For non-commercial purposes please forward, post,
     and link as you see fit.
     _______________________________________________
     Keith Dawson               dawson at world.std.com
     Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.

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