Re: Encryption?

[m-j milloy <milloy@voir.ca>]

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>I honestly feel that once encryption (PGP?) becomes SECONDARY, meaning
>transparent, then and only then will encyrption become truly accepted.

In response to this...

ZeroKnowledge, a local Montreal software joint, is going to be releasing 
a privacy solution this week that promises to be secondary and 
transparent... though whether this will lead to encryption becoming 
widely accepted amongst cypherpunks _and_ Ma and Pa Pentium remains to be 
seen.

It's called Freedom and works at the system level; effectively scrubbing 
identifying details on all TCP/IP, SMTP/POP & NNTP traffic, encrypting 
this traffic, and passing the traffic through supported servers on the 
internet to make it untraceable. I've seen an early beta of the software 
and it looks pretty cool; you just start up the software (Windoze only at 
this point, but the geeks promise to do real OSes (i.e. Linux and Mac) 
soon) and it chugs along merrily in the background. Note that it is not 
an 'anonymizer', but allows you to create various online pseudonyms and 
manage how much information is released online.

Full technical details are available at www.zeroknowledge.com.

The usual suspects -- various political activists, purveyors of workplace 
porn, cypherpunks, hackers, journalists, etc -- will probably love this 
thing; whether or not it is accepted by 'regular' users -- Amazon.com 
shoppers, gamers, etc -- remains to be seen, and is probably dependent on 
how widely the privacy concerns of the internet is distributed.

More interesting for our purposes is the effect that this technology 
might have on various online activities and, more importantly, on various 
online forms of surveillance, both corporate and governmental/military. 
If this thing works, 'wiretapping' and data-mining would become much more 
difficult, maybe causing a rethink in the corporate support structure of 
the internet and government attempts to regulate the net.




m-j




_________________________________________
M-J Milloy
News Editor,
HOUR Magazine
Montreal, PQ

514.848.0777 (voice)
514.848.9004 (fax)

www.afterhour.com


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