The National Institute of Standards and Technology has officially designated Digital Signature Standard (DSS) public-key cryptography as a Federal Information Processing Standard (#186), effective 12/1/94. Federal agencies, businesses, and private individuals can now authenticate digital signatures for bids and other electronically submitted data. In other news, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has voted to allow the export of software with any kind of encryption, dealing a blow to NSA-backed Clipper chip proposals. The provision bars the government from requiring export encryption licenses for "generally available software."
The National Science Foundation has awarded contracts to telephone companies to operate Internet "Network Access Points" (NAPs) and an NSF-funded very high-speed backbone. According to the Washington-based Taxpayer Assets Project, there are indications that the telephone companies operating the NAPs will push to price Internet services based on Internet usage, instead of the now common flat-fee.