In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Eric Cordian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Ian Goldberg's reputation capital is all that is holding up ZKS. He's >never fucked anything up before, and has performed many stunning >cryptographic feats in the past. > >Had he not been on board, no one would have given ZKS more than a cursory >glance, and the obvious criticisms would have been taken much more >seriously. I would dispute that. We've got stellar people all over the company, in all manner of areas, technical and non-technical. I might have been the first Zero-Knowledge employee whose name you recognized, but we've now got a good number of them. Adam Shostack, Adam Back, and Stefan Brands are obvious examples. That having been said, Open Source is clearly a goal for us. We've got a number of people (headed by Mike Shaver, recently of Mozilla) working on it, but if we had more, it'd go faster. Maybe instead of the anonymous poster complaining that we're moving too slowly, he could move himself over to jobs.zeroknowledge.com, and help things along? But even before the source gets opened up (and honestly, *I* have no idea what the timetable is; I'm not in management (thank God), and keeping up with the timetables of 200+ employees is not what I spend my time doing (what I *do* spend my time doing nowadays is writing up my thesis (on the design of the Freedom network, natch) so that I can finish up at Berkeley and move the last of my stuff out of your DMCA'ed up country)), we've put out whitepapers describing the protocol (in detail), as well as outlining a whole bunch of attacks on our own system. That's pretty open; you don't see a lot of companies doing that. We've gotten some good feedback from cypherpunks and others, and more is encouraged. We want to build a system that doesn't centralize trust, with us, or with anyone else. There are many, many steps to take to get there, and we *won't* be able to do it completely (Lucky can take up the issue of things like back doors in the ROMs of ethernet cards). You *can't* open source it all the way down to the quantum mechanics. But we'll do what we can do, and since most people's threat model doesn't include spooks 0wning their machines by sending a special packet to their NIC, it'll likely be good enough for them. [Oh, and about the "moving in the opposite direction" by acquiring patents. That's clearly baloney. The patents existed. Would you rather they sit around unused, with no one able to deploy effecient minimal-disclosure private certificates and offline elecronic cash, or that some company with a non-trivial cypherpunk contingent grab them, and actually get some stuff *out there*? And again, if you're complaining it's taking too long, get thee to jobs.zeroknowledge.com.] - Ian
