On Sep 16, 2009, at 4:15 PM, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
David Shaw wrote:
Whether this means IDEA is okay or not patent-wise, I have a slightly
different take on this: who cares about IDEA at this point? IDEA was
good back in the 90s and PGP 2.x. It's 2009 now, and we have better
ciphers than IDEA, a massive installed software base that doesn't use
IDEA, and nobody is suffering for the lack of IDEA. If IDEA was
suddenly not patented, none of this would change.
Some people use remailers and other tools which depend on PGP
2.6/RFC1991 traffic. There are some people who would very much like
to
see GnuPG fully support RFC1991 so it can replace the very long in the
tooth PGP 2.6.
If the "some people" still want this, I haven't seen it in a good long
while. Possibly they gave up asking. Still, it doesn't matter.
GnuPG is not a RFC-1991 tool, and a theoretical un-patenting of IDEA
doesn't change that either. To say nothing of the fact that compliant
OpenPGP implementations are explicitly banned from generating RFC-1991
keys.
In effect, the request you're paraphrasing seems to be "Add support
for a dead, deprecated, and weaker format to GnuPG, and then deal with
a massive software distribution problem so everyone can have the new
version, all so a few remailers and tools don't have to upgrade to
OpenPGP". That argument might have made more sense in 1999, to help
get people through the transition, but it's not 1999 any more.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that upgrading the relatively few
remailers is an easier job...
David
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