Herve Recipon (recipon at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) wrote:
: In article 2J0 at phibred.com, brookerg at phibred.com (Glenn Brooke) writes:
: !> Can anyone please point me towards information about encrypting
: !>BLAST e-mail searches? I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone
....
: And as usual ... Happy BLASting !
OH NO! :-(
...
: 'rsa.license' and by USA export regulations. Due to Federal export
: restrictions on data encryption software, the RIPEM source code and
: software may not be distributed outside of the U.S.A. and Canada.
Despite the respect which I owe the NCBI and similar US organizations
let me comment that we follow this development with great concern. I am
very much interested to implement cryptographic methods in our HASSLE
software package, which does also BLAST searches, in order to move
towards standards rather than rely on our proprietary encryption which
we employ now. Any cryptography on the 'accepted' type of public implementa-
tion (RSA, PGP, IDEA, etc) is severely hindered by these clauses which
are meant to keep secrets to those who deserve to claim being the
standard.
It is extremely unfortunate to see things like this happen, and get carried
into biocomputing. As it implies that possible future access for those
who don't want ascii text send around will become impossible if encryption
is 'standard'.
Back to the US/EUrope stoneage of competition?
Reinhard Doelz
Head, Biocomputing
Biozentrum der Universitaet Basel, Switzerland
--
+---------------------------+-------------------------------------------+
| Dr. Reinhard Doelz | Tel. x41 61 2672247 Fax x41 61 2672078 |
| Biocomputing | electronic Mail doelz at urz.unibas.ch |
|Biozentrum der Universitaet+-------------------------------------------+
