torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi (Linus Torvalds) wrote on 15.05.96 in <Pine.LNX.3.91.960515095405.27927F-100000@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI>:
> Too bad Zimmerman wasn't convicted - he wasn't guilty of breaking any
> silly cryptography laws, but he _was_ guilty of very bad programming. The
> PGP single-character escape stuff is broken, in bad taste, and should not
> be allowed (*).
>
> The people who created MIME not only should be convicted, they should be
> shot on the spot. I have a reasonably mime-aware mailer (pine), but I
> _still_ have more problems with MIME mail than I ever had with non-MIME.
> I'm seriously considering refusing to even look at mails or patches that
> use MIME-encoding other than cleartext.
The only people that should be shot, on the spot or otherwise, are people
suggesting stuff like shooting or imprisoning other people for "crimes"
that, at worst, amount to different opinions, even if the suggestion was
only in jest.
Being the inventor of the best OS ever is not an excuse - if anything,
posting from a position of authority makes it worse.
I obviously feel quite strongly about this - maybe because this part of
the world has had bad experiences (to use an euphemism) with killing
people for their opinions (or even only behaviour to an ethnic group).
MfG Kai
----- End of forwarded message from Kai Henningsen -----
I second Kai's opinion, but...
Using a really old mail tool (elm compiled for HP terminals and
even refusing to work over telnet reasonably :-(, I can not do
anything with not-cleartext mail, and :
There Is No Need In A Mailing List For It!
We can communicate with good-old 7bit ASCII! Please write clear text!
Some mailers get confused with national characters, so write "s or ss
for a german "Scharfes-S", and so on!
Non-oldstyle encoding can severely break a mailtool, and if you try to
print a letter that was specially encoded, and the system allows you to
save the content, but does not encode it, so the print utility says:
"This is no text file" - that is not funny at all!
Please do not tell me to upgrade the system. I am not the superuser,
he does not have the time, and there is no real need.
-- flame mode off --
-- calming down ........
Thank you all for not using UNKNOWN8BITCHARSET encodings ...
+--+ Hartmut
-- Hartmut Niemann niemann@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de Zum Aussichtsturm 18 D-91080 Marloffstein