Connecting both aspects though: arguably the failure of subsequent technologies to fulfill the decentralized Notes vision has facilitated the rise of extreme centralization and greatly exacerbated our privacy problems.
Fun fact: The Atari 7800, designed in 1983, used a 956-bit Rabin signature to vendor lock games. Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits.
But not to encrypt the communication -- that would have been, apparently, against the U.S. laws of that time.
> Strong cryptography was unavailable for a long time primarily due to indifference, ignorance, and interference and not primarily due to computational limits.
It's surely the "interference" in the form of the mentioned U.S. laws at the time, some other comments here detail the historical background.
However, export was another matter and the export version of the 7800 left the crypto out!
In any case, my point was that weak crypto spanning into the late 90s was not a result of technical limitations.
The laws as they were had exactly that effect: a lot of companies didn’t intend to have products sold solely in the US. And it was problematic enough that most companies avoided making a US-only version: even carrying such a product on a floppy disk while travelling outside of US could get you in trouble, see this article from 1995:
https://www.wired.com/1995/03/the-continuing-investigation-o...
The companies that did use strong crypto typically had the contracts with the military.
I think both of us might be making the error of correcting something the other person wasn't intending to comment on! :)
Some export complications around crypto exist to this very day-- at least for commercial hardware products. I've had to fill out the export forms myself, and not that many years ago.
"As you know, the U.S. government has defined its "maximum tolerance level" for exportable unescrowed cryptography at 40 bits. That is, because they generally permit the export of 40-bit products, the U.S. government is clearly already willing to deal with a 40-bit work factor in order to examine encrypted communications outside of this country.
So, the system that we're shipping in Lotus Notes Release 4 overseas is one that presents different work factors to different parties, hence the name.
Against crackers -- against the run-of-the-mill adversary trying to break a message -- the work factor is 64 bits, just like it is in the U.S. That is, in the new International Edition of Lotus Notes, bulk data keys are now 64 bits just as they are in our North American Edition that's sold in the U.S. and Canada.
But when the U.S. Government needs access to a communications stream overseas encoded by the international edition of Lotus Notes, they are no worse off - and no better off - than they are today - they have to crack 40 bits."
Since then, the goals of different interest groups haven't changed, and we all now about many new possibilities and about the surveillance actually being done and the dangers that the changes brought and can bring.
Other comments here in the other threads are about these more recent issues and the readers should note them too.