Zombie Cow wrote:
> Or start producing Open Sourced CPUs and motherboards.
>
> IBM has an Open Source PPC motherboard, and here's an
> article referring to an Open Source CPU by Sun:
>
> (Well, they're not really "Open Source", but still, open enough..)
> (Search www.techweb.com for the source URL, I don't have it here.)
>
I rather like this direction. The PowerPC chips seem well suited to
practical crypto on firewalls and servers. They have good support for
both little endian (think MD5), and big-endian (think SHA1), and the
new AltiVec stuff may be great for running a large number of
Diffie-Hellman operations.
On the other hand, having the actual CPU source, we could stop worrying
about Intel's ID gaffs, and RNG support, and "know" it is built correctly.
Either way, the crypto community needs to come together and have a plan!
====
On the original topic of this thread, I talked to my congresscritter today,
and she'll talk to Zoe Baird and others. I think she understood the
implications of the secret court evidence. And she was very surprised to
learn about the quotes about no "relaxation" from the press conference.
They're on recess at the moment, from the hurricane, so this is a good time
to catch them at the local office. Talk to yours! Especially if they were
signed on as co-sponsors of SAFE (look it up in Thomas or thru CDT).
Again, the crypto community needs to educate (as best we can) the
legislators, to dispel some of the murk that's coming down from the
administration. Personal contact would do a lot for our community.
You need to think of a good local hook to get their attention, tho.
Some of mine were:
- That Detroit teachers strike 2 weeks ago was technically illegal,
even though they had no contract. Our state law requires that they go
to work even without pay. They are "lawbreakers", and their cell phones
could be tracked and calls recorded, and their computers searched to
uncover the "conspiracy". (As the former A2 school board president,
she got that right away.)
- Do we trust the same people that lied to the Attorney General about
snipers and use of incendiaries for Waco, with telling the truth and
always getting proper warrants? Haven't we had this problem before
with J Edgar, civil rights, union busting, and secretly spying on
congress members?
- We just learned a few weeks ago that every copy of Windows has a secret
NSA key. We don't know why. Remember the Lotus Notes secret NSA key
fiasco that got us in trouble with the Swedish government? How can we
ever compete, when nobody trusts our software?
- The prohibition against revealing key recovery techniques could make
me a criminal. Do you want to see me go to jail?
- We have a whole lab of people that break smart cards and such at U-Mich.
Should they go to jail?
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Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
