Sorry for the confusion.
The title above referred to me passing the *right* information along,
as opposed to last year's press announcement, which was, of course,
embarrassing, but not the end of the world.
As to whether the current administration's new cryptography
regulations are better, I agree with John Young's indictment of this
latest beaurosophistic spin-festival. Their Xenonian process of
recursive half-regulation is as much a sham as everything else the
government has done with respect to strong cryptography.
If they were to say they were completely decontrolling cryptography
export, then it would matter, but, of course, they will never say it.
And, frankly, as Tim May says time and time again, it doesn't really
matter whether American companies can sell cryptography to the rest
of the world, as long as they can sell cryptography in America. The
rest of the world is demonstrating a marked ability to take care of
itself in that regard, anyway. To my mind, the market, and not the
law, matters here, and the market is doing just fine, thank you very
much.
Furthermore, the market for internet financial cryptography
understands the theory of limits a whole lot better than our current
crop of innumerate, latter-day Sophist "policymakers" ever can: Just
keep taking halfsies, and, quite quickly, you eventually end up with
the whole thing.
Even better, the half-life of this particular game of halfsies seems
to go down geometrically as the number of dollars spent over the
internet goes up.
More fun with numbers.
"Policymakers" can claim a geocentric universe and a flat earth as
far into the age of discovery as they want to, in other words. What
they *say* doesn't matter nearly as much as what the market *does*.
Cheers,
RAH
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
