On the road to Bandol

Another piece of Internet fun today. Bruce Schneier has promoted Net1 to the doghouse (i.e., vendors of cryptographic snake oil and other phony products). This surprised me a bit, since Net1 owns Prizm, one of Trusted Logic’s competitors on smart card operating systems. Not that this brings me to like them, but the doghouse is quite surprising.

The reason for this promotion is this little bit of stupid advertising on the Security page of their product description:

The FTS Patent has been acclaimed by leading cryptographic authorities around the world as the most innovative and secure protocol ever invented to manage offline and online smart card related transactions. Please see the independent report by Bruce Schneider in his book entitled Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition published in the late 1990s.

This is quite a dumb sentence. Citing Bruce Schneier (most likely without telling him) got them in the doghouse. What that means is that all of Bruce Schneier’s blog readers (a significant number in the security industry) have poked a little fun at them, for the least. The next bad thing is that they are in very bad company in Schneier’s doghouse, which is full of companies that sell really really phony products. But of course, there is more.

Then come the angry comments to Schneier’s blog, including the following interesting items:

• A few recommendations to sue the guys, as expected from an american audience
• A suggestion to “blackhole their DNS”. I am not sure what blackholing consists of exactly, but I don’t expect it to be good for traffic
• Some nice recommendations for Bruce, like “I’m sure it’s a scam of some sort, and if you give them the slightest feeling that they are found out, they might just give it up and move on to the next scam”.
• My personal favorite is a guy that says that their Fund Transfer Service (FTS) patent “seems like a very straight forward electronic payment system”. Sure is a basic smart card based system, but it also dates back from 1992, which makes it a rather early patent on this topic (actually, it will expire in about 3 years from now).

These fascinating comments primarily show us that, as Matt Asay states it, Trolls shall inherit the Web. On the other hand, I would not like my company to get that kind of comments.

Overall, I am happy that Net1 didn’t get away with their deceptive little paragraph, but I don’t believe that they deserve that kind of bashing. Of course, it is limited to a relatively small community, but one that has many connections with Net1’s customers. I am not sure that it will have any adverse effect on Net1, but maybe that it will have an effect on the guy who wrote/validated that page, and if it happens, this is good news for a more truthful Web. The first sign would be an update of that page. We’ll see.