E-mail from Bill (1994) • Hacker News Board

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#11

Post by jimmaswell » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 12:08 AM UTC

ben_jones wrote: post #9

aabajian wrote: post #8

"Around the same time, I read an essay in Wired magazine by Paul Saffo, who is a director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, which argued that the information highway is going to cause a flowering of personal expression not seen in our society since the sixties, and that when this happens (maybe in five years) people whom we now think of as computer nerds will have the same hipness that in r…

Did they? It seems like people are only interested in the surface of tech, the sexy acquisitions, the new Steve Jobs movie, the new iPhone. And then I try to bring up why password requirements are security theatre and people's eyes gloss over. I've taken to telling people my job description of "works at tech company" and leave it at that.

The anti-password sentiment I've seen sometimes is annoying. They serve their purpose just fine. The worst you get is that password leaks and such happen sometimes and people forget and have to reset them sometimes.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#12

Post by mojoe » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 12:42 AM UTC

a_small_island wrote: post #10

>"BILL GATES, aged thirty-eight, is one of the richest men in the country—the richest in 1992, and the second richest, after the investor Warren Buffett, in 1993, with a fortune of six billion one hundred and sixty million dollars, according to Forbes. " Very strange that only just 20-25 years ago, the richest people in the world were "only" worth <7,000,000,000

~12 billion inflation-adjusted, but your point stands.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#13

Post by mojoe » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 12:48 AM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #11

ben_jones wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they? It seems like people are only interested in the surface of tech, the sexy acquisitions, the new Steve Jobs movie, the new iPhone. And then I try to bring up why password requirements are security theatre and people's eyes gloss over. I've taken to telling people my job description of "works at tech company" and leave it at that.

The anti-password sentiment I've seen sometimes is annoying. They serve their purpose just fine. The worst you get is that password leaks and such happen sometimes and people forget and have to reset them sometimes.

He said 'password requirements' not 'passwords.' I'm assuming he meant the nonsense wherein "you must have a number, lower and upppercase letter, symbol, and a demon-summoning pentagram in your password."

https://xkcd.com/936/

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#14

Post by Viper007Bond » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 1:34 AM UTC

It made me smile that I was reading this in digital form on a computer that fits in my pocket and is always connected to the "information highway".

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#15

Post by Animats » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 1:42 AM UTC

The amazing thing was that as late as 1994, Bill Gates had a public email address.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#16

Post by gcek9 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 1:51 AM UTC

> "The pioneers of personal computers including Jobs, Kapor, Lampson, Roberts, Kaye, are all great people but I don’t think any of us will merit an entry in a history book."

I don't think that will prove true for Mr. Gates or Mr. Jobs.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#17

Post by tinco » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:01 AM UTC

There's a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye:

" Our email is completely secure. . . ."

Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they? Apparently PGP is from 1991, but they are using msmail (judging from the headers) so I don't reckon they were using that.

The movie "Hackers" would come out about a year after that. The cyberpunk genre had been going on a full decade, did Bill really believe no one could read their e-mail? Of course Bill knew about security issues, but was it just not on his mind? Obviously it's not very smart to talk about the sort of thing that is a fundamental threat to business of internet technology to a journalist, but to state outright that it was completely secure seems to be a be going a bit far.

I always wondered why it took so long for Microsoft to develop a proper security story, or even properly developing anything Internet related properly in that time. They could have been twice the company they are now if they took it as serious as this article makes it look Bill took it. Microsoft wasn't anything on the Internet but the company who built your OS and let your mark up your documents for the next ten years after this article.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#18

Post by jm4 » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:26 AM UTC

tinco wrote: post #17

There's a lot of interesting story in this article, but this sentence caught my eye: " Our email is completely secure. . . ." Why would Bill Gates say that? Surely he knew their e-mails were going plain text through a host of providers, network operators and mail relays, or weren't they? Apparently PGP is from 1991, but they are using msmail (judging from the headers) so I don't reckon they were using that. The movie…

Read the sentence right before that one where he says no one else reads his email. The implication is that he doesn't have an assistant screening his messages. His email is completely secure in the sense that it's a private one on one conversation, which is to say it's as private as a quiet conversation in a coffee shop or at a park for example. I don't think he is implying it's necessarily secure from hackers and eavesdroppers.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#19

Post by CPLX » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #15

The amazing thing was that as late as 1994, Bill Gates had a public email address.

Perhaps. I believe that year is around the time when I first got an email address myself, and if I recall it wasn't another 3-4 years before I knew more than a tiny handful of people who had one as well and used it regularly.

Re: E-mail from Bill (1994)

#20

Post by dtjohnnymonkey » Mon, Jul 04, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

phirschybar wrote: post #5

increment_i wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a kid in the 90's so I remember keenly the unmistakeable technological shift. People started saying "information highway" an awful lot. And I remember the first time me and my friend used dial up networking to play Doom 2, and I could see his character's movements on my screen in realtime, and I thought, "I am living in the future."

wasn't it "information SUPER-highway"? :)

When I was in 6th grade (~1993), someone's dad came to talk about our class about the "superhighway of information" or the "information highway". It always bugged me that he didn't say "information superhighway".