Your invective is not worth my time to answer. However, a few points for those
subscribers who are still interested in protocol engineering.:
At 6:28 PM 10/25/93 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
Second, you continually say "designed to fit with other protocols in
the Internet suite", and I ask, WHICH ONES?
If youretrieve RFC 1421 and search for the characters "RFC", I believe you will
find mention of RFC 822, RFC 821 (specifically, information concerning SMTP's
transparency constraints), and RFC934 (concerning recursive encapsulation of
messages within other messages).
Third, you state, under RFC 1423, "The algorithms ... DES, well, given the $1M
DES key-search engine, I would forward that it was a bright decision,
way ahead of its time. Wouldn't you?
DES was chosen eight years ago. The PEM Working Group of the IETF has already
started work on specifying triple-DES. Similarly, a couple of years ago we
upped the range for PEM's RSA modulus as factoring advanced.
One of the reasons that the Internet has
done so well is that people can generate new uses for old ideas,
taking things in directions that the original creator(s) may not have
even dreamed possible.
Anyone is welcome to propose changes to PEM, either in on this list or at the
WG meetings at the IETF. PEM is not "owned" by anyone. It is a Proposed
Standard in the context of the ISOC/IAB/IETF. This list and those meetings not
only are open to everyone (and to all rational ideas) in the Internet
community, but they provide a specific place where it is useful to put
constuctive ideas forward and where they will be considered on their merits.
Of course, the most constructive mode is to come to the IETF with a
presentation accompanied by suggested new text, or at least to publish the
suggested textual changes as Internet-Draft modifications of the existing RFCs,
or as entirely new Internet-Drafts proposed as Experimental Protocols in
parallel with the PEM development.
However, this cuts two ways. When that written language is published, it also
is open to scrutiny and criticism by anyone at all, whether the author likes it
or not.