Like a lot of other people, I'm not very interested in the iPadmyself for all of the obvious reasons for an open source personwho likes doing random things to his computers (see Tim Bray for arepresentative example). But I have a theory about what Appleis up to here, and it goes like this:

The iPad is a computer for people who do not like computers, not acomputer for people who like computers.

The problem with making computers for people who like computers is thatit

I can't claim to know very much about cryptography programming, but Ilike to think that I have picked up on a few mistakes to avoid. Here'sone of them: you want to sign exactly what you are authenticating, notsome mangled version of it .

(Note that 'canonicalizing' things is a form of mangling them.)

Suppose, as a not entirely hypothetical example ,that you are signing some sort of web request with a bunch of (URL)parameters. In order to deal

Once upon a time, AT&T had Unix, and Unix was big (by the standards ofthe time); it contained all sorts of things that made it useful. AT&Tdecided that it wanted to make as much money as possible from Unix,so it had a brilliant idea: it would sell a bunch of pieces of 'Unix'separately, as additional cost extras. After all, Unix systems wereprimarily used to run canned vendor-developed software (or at least AT&Tno