"first met dave Farber" -- Newer, Smaller, Faster, and Not in Stores Now

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Stewart, William C (Bill), RTSLS <billstewart () att com>
Date: Fri, 09 May 2003 02:53:05 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>, ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: RE: [IP] Newer, Smaller, Faster, and Not in Stores Now

I first met Dave Farber in person when I was
taking the train from DC back to New Jersey in 1990 or 1991.
The person sitting across from me was an older man who had
the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (only 6 pounds!
An IBM model with katakana/romanji keyboard only sold in Japan),
a Skytel alphanumeric pager, before those were at all common,
and the smallest cellphone I'd ever seen (I think it was one of the
Motorola flip-phone designs, back when most portable phones were
brick-sized.)
I was reading a crypto paper that John Gilmore had pointed me to.
We introduced ourselves, and I recognized Dave's name partly because
Peter Honeyman occasionally referred to Dave's interesting-people
list,
and partly because the EFF had recently been founded.  Small world...

I'm typing this tonight on an appallingly heavy 6-pound laptop,
though the screen's nicer than they were back then
and it probably has more RAM than Dave's 1990 machine had disk,
my cellphone's not particularly tiny, but it's acceptably
pocket-sized and 
can do alphanumeric text messaging, my $39 SiPix digital camera is
about 2"x2"
(almost down to the price of disposable cameras...)
and I'm using a 3DES VPN to reach the mail server at work
and can use PGP, legally, with just a couple of keystrokes.

Unfortunately, Moore's Law doesn't map as well to politics as
technology.
We've made some significant progress in the last decade and a
quarter,
but our civil liberties aren't doubling every year and a half,
and government doesn't get increasingly smaller or cheaper,
though it's been getting more powerful if not more effective.
Some of Chaum's patents on anonymous digital cash and blinded
signatures
and credentials without identity expire in a couple of years,
but the market's been moving more toward biometrics and
(more importantly) massive database collection and correlation.
So there's still a lot of work to do.

        Bill Stewart, bill.stewart () pobox com

------ End of Forwarded Message

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