[67173] in Cypherpunks
Re: Fighting Clipper III
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim McCoy)
Thu Oct 3 15:23:57 1996
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.961003063629.18620C-100000@eff.org>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 12:08:01 -0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@communities.com>
Declan McCullagh <declan@eff.org> writes:
>You'll have trouble doing a successful boycott of RSA. What, you won't
>use Netscape Navigator or PGP?
Actually RSA is not a hard target for people like us to threaten. The
Diffie-Hellman patent expires in 210 days. Cylink is prevented from taking
legal action against anyone for violating this patent while the current
lawsuit is being decided. When Diffie-Hellman expires ElGamal is available
for use for free. So the best threat one can make against RSA is to directly
challenge their revenue stream: start working on making ElGamal an available
option in all systems which use RSA.
jim
