Happy Birthday To You

Not on the national holiday list, but still an important landmark:

Dignitaries from the computer security field took the stage at the Computer History Museum on Oct. 26 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of public key cryptography, wax historical about academic, governmental and commercial developments in security, and ponder the future. Panelists included persons such as Whitfield Diffie, a cryptography pioneer and chief security officer at Sun Microsystems; Notes creator Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft's chief software architect, and Brian Snow, retired director for the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate. They touched on topics ranging from NSA obstacles and export regulations to decades-old research papers and the Clipper chip.