"--for-your-eyes-only"

[Janusz A. Urbanowicz]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 04:36:53PM +0200, Werner Koch wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:55:02 +0200, Janusz A Urbanowicz said:
> 
> > Some form of secure viewer was present in PGP 2.3 and 2.6 which were FLOSS.
> 
> Huh, that's new to me.  Both versions are pure command line tools
> without a graphical part.  No way to make use fo filtered fonts.

The aim of the secure viewer then was to make difficult to obtain eyes-only
message text as a file or a pipe. It checked if output is a live tty,
prevented the plaintext ending on the swap and leaving any temp files.

It was really difficult to get eyes-only message in plain file form with it
in the way (there was no /dev/vcs etc in the days and it needs root anyway).
 
> I am not sure what kind of software you collect untder the term of
> FLOSS; if you mean Free Software, PGP has never been Free Software
> despite what many people claimed.

Software that was distributed under GPL: pgp 2.3 and 2.3a. And pleaase don't
let the discussion slip in legalese tetrapiloctomisation.

> > Unless they patented it (sigh) it can be renginered back to the GPG, like
> > Photo-IDs.
> 
> Photo IDs are a feature of PGP6 and now OpenPGP.

My point exactly, excapt that secure viewer needs not to be defined in the
protocol RFC.
-- 
mors ab alto 
0x46399138