http://iearobotics.com/alberto/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=teaching:beatufulcode.pdfIN MID-1999 I FLEW TO COSTA RICA TO WORK WITH LAISSEZ FAIRE CITY, a group that was working to create software systems to help usher in a new era of individual sovereignty.
The group at LFC was working primarily to develop a suite of software designed to protect and enhance individual rights in the digital age, including easy-to-use secure email, online dispute mediation services, an online stock exchange, and a private asset trading and banking system. My interest in many of the same technologies had been piqued long ago by the cypherpunks list and Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography (Wiley), and I’d already been working on prototype implementations of some of these systems.
The most fundamental of these were systems to deliver strong and usable communications privacy to just about everybody.
When I stepped into LFC’s sprawling “interim consulate” outside San José, Costa Rica, they had a working prototype of a secure webmail system they called MailVault. It ran on Mac OS 9, used FileMaker as its database, and was written in Frontier. Not at all the mix of technologies you’d want to run a mission-critical communications service on, but that’s what the programmers had produced.
It was no surprise the system crashed early and often, and was extremely fragile. It could hardly support two concurrent users. LFC was facing a credibility crisis with its investors, as their software releases had been delayed many times, and their first beta of MailVault, the flagship product, was no gem. So in the free time left over from my contract network and system administration work at LFC, I started writing a new secure mail system from scratch.
This system is now named Cryptonite and has been in constant off-and-on development
and testing since then, in between other projects.
The first functioning prototype of Cryptonite was licensed to LFC as MailVault beta 2, and was open for testing in September 1999. It was the first OpenPGP-compatible webmail system available for public use and was almost immediately put to the test by LFC’s investors and beta testers. Since that time, Cryptonite has evolved in many ways through interaction with users, the open source community, and the market. While not an open source product itself, it has led to the development of numerous components I decided to release as open source along the way.
Imagine Ashish walking into Sonny's BFL's facility now seeing the same clusterfuck.