don@allegra.UUCP (12/05/83)
To answer the question about secretmail, xsend and xget was based on a knapsack scheme that has since been broken. It was written at Bell Labs by Peter Weinberger. Unfortunately, the Berkeley manual contains "AUTHOR" entries only for things hacked at Berkeley which is unfortunate since BTL and a number of universities made fundamental contributions (U. of Sydney and U. of Toronto in particular). For example, relatively uninteresting programs like vfontinfo and vgrind are proudly AUTHOR'ed. The vtroff program itself was written at Toronto by Mark Tilson, but his name has even been removed from the source listing! (It was there in an V6 version I used in grad school) Additional work on vtroff was done at the University of Purdue.
davidson@sdcsvax.UUCP (12/07/83)
In addition to being considered breakable, I understand that the method used for UNIX secretmail will not not support digital signatures. Does anyone know of a replacement for secretmail without these deficiencies, either available now, or in the offing? I'm glad someone mentioned the elimination of authors from the Berkeley UNIX manual. I've never heard anyone mention this except to complain about it. Is anyone on the Berkeley UNIX project listening? (They might also restore the dates of when each document was last modified.) -Greg
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/08/83)
allegra!don points out that Mike Tilson's name was removed from vtroff
(or rather, some of its constituent pieces) at Berkeley. This is even
more dubious than it sounds, because Berkeley almost certainly got that
software under the standard U of T distribution agreement, which quite
explicitly requires that proper credit be given. (It *also* requires
that the stuff not be distributed without U of T's permission, although
this may perhaps have been granted quietly.)
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry