Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: Ruminations on Electronic Messaging Assoc. show
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Wed, 01 May 1996 17:30:52 -0400
Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 13:16:57 -0700 From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker () brandenburg com> Folks seem to be treating this week as a watershed, in comparing it to last year's EMA meeting. Things went from "Internet mail is nice but X.400 is the future for business", to "Now that Internet mail has won, how long with X.400 hang around?". On the other hand, I hear that some X.400 sales are continuing to grow. As my wife likes to remind me, it takes awhile to turn a big ship... Lotus is touting their Notes product with a t-shirt slogan that Notes is a messaging system you won't have to "exchange"... Phil Zimmerman announced the creation of PGP, Inc. Domain name PGP.Com, but no web page yet. Phil is chairman. Tom Stedding, formerly of Novell, is CEO. Jonathan Seybold <jseybold () pgp com> is on the board and, apparently the active agent for oem-type deals. Dan Lynch is also on the board. Phil said that there were two major deals just signed or about to be signed (he wasn't sure of the exact status), one with a major email company and the other with a major computer company. They don't have a marketing person yet. Phil's presentation was quite funny. The audience laughed a lot. What I am not sure about is the actual impression he made. Phil explained that PGP had been a volunteer effort and that he didn't have slides for the presentation because he didn't have a secretary. He also said that people often told him that they could not choose PGP for their business requirements because PGP wasn't backed by a company. So, he decided to form one. The S/MIME and MSP presentations in the session gave basic background of their functionality. (Newsflash: Steve Dusse showed S/MIME as (now) supporting MIME Multipart/Signed. This is quite recent and I doubt anyone's products will support it for awhile.) Phil's talk had no technical or functional content. He cited it as having an installed base but gave no numbers. His talk focused on his lack of administrative support, on the lack of PGP, Inc. having a web page, on having to find offices first, and so on. He dropped his microphone a couple of times... As I say, the audience laughed quite a bit. Vigorously. But I wonder whether they walked away believing that PGP, Inc. is going to provide the responsible, stable, corporate basis for PGP? Separately, I wonder whether PGP will be offered in its entirety to the Internet standards process (neither s/mime nor msp have been, only their MIME enveloping) and I wonder whether there doesn't need to be another commercial source of the core technology. Anyhow, email security is turning into an interesting horse race. I didn't count MSP, the security technology from the US Defense Messaging System, as a serious contender until this week. At least two companies are already offering it, even with smartcard (fortezza) support. And MSP is the only contender that currently claims to support non-repudiation of recipients. Quite a few booths had signs showing S/MIME support. I believe none are shipping product yet. (This isn't a problem, since interoperability testing for s/mime only just got under way.) On the other hand, I heard a report of the RSA press conference which was supposed to tout S/MIME support. Apparently a number of the companies tapped to state support instead stated merely that s/mime was "one of" the alternatives available to users. It will be interesting to see whether the press realized how badly this (apparently) went. On a different note, it was interesting to see various presentations talk about the importance of interoperability and -- now get this -- the adequacy of gateways. These are folks using proprietary applications which are then gatewayed the Internet and other proprietary applications. For an Internet purist, this gives one considerable pause. d/ -------------------- Dave Crocker +1 408 246 8253 Brandenburg Consulting fax: +1 408 249 6205 675 Spruce Dr. dcrocker () brandenburg com Sunnyvale CA 94086 USA http://www.brandenburg.com Internet Mail Consortium http://www.imc.org, info () imc org
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