I have no idea about "IDEA."

[Johan Wevers]

none none wrote:

> Theft of intellectual property usually falls under copyright law, at
> least in the United States.

Therefore it's not theft, but something else: breaking copyright law.
Also conceptually there is a big difference: when I steal something, the
original owner doesn't have it anymore. When I break copyright laws, the
owner still has as much as he had before.

> I don't like making broad cultural statements, but people here (in
> particular competitors and enemies) have developed the talent of using
> negative publicity to a remarkable degree. And public knowledge of
> use of non-licensed software would likely arouse the interest of the
> BSA (the software police - they can seize a the entire IT infrastructure
> of a company for the purpose on auditing it,

Well, here they also try to intimidate, but fear for them is not that large.
And besides, Ascom is not a member of the BSA. As long as a company doesn't
use unlicenced copies of MS or Adobe software there's not much reason for
fear.

And the general public doesn't care wether a company uses unlicenced
software, almost all private persons here do that, I too. The only
software paid for were a copy of OS/2, the OSS sound drivers for Linux
and a German version of MS-DOS 4 that came with my first computer.

>>But since IDEA was implemented in pgp 2.x, it received much more
attention.
>
>But it has no future. Where will they get NEW customers?

Users != customers.

> No one wants to put a non-free algorithm in their product with reasonable
> free alternatives available.

It's used in pgp 2.x, which is in many area's still the preferred method of
encryption and signing. The Dutch system where some usenet providers allow
only signed cancels for spam and binaries is an example of it.

> In addition, all of the research into the strength of the various
> algorithms has moved to AES, Blowfish, and Twofish.

Possibly. And the first possible weaknesses of Rijndael are already found,
although I don't know how serious they are. Not very seriously I think,
since the amount of noise about it would be much higher if they were.

>> I don't follow the developments on that subject very closely - are they
>> finally building cfs into the standard kernel, instead of having to go
>> to http://www.kerneli.org for it?

> Yes. It seems our government has finally developed at least a small amount
> of sense with regards to this issue.

Good. Now I hope they don't come up with the idea that terrorists might use
it, from whet I hear from here that seems to be sufficient to remove almost
all personal liberties the government considers usable to terrorists.

-- 
ir. J.C.A. Wevers         //  Physics and science fiction site:
johanw@vulcan.xs4all.nl   //  http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/index.html
PGP/GPG public keys at http://www.xs4all.nl/~johanw/pgpkeys.html