Comment Suprised MS isn't cyring "conflict of interest" (Score 5, Insightful) 345
Wittfield Diffie is an engineer at Sun Microsystems, one of the only corporations that can be considered a Microsoft competitor. Ron Rivest is a professor as his day job, but gets quite a bit of cash from RSA, and Microsoft isn't using any of the code that RSA provides (BSAFE, etc) in Paladium, so that's a big chunk of change that won't be coming his way.
We here on slashdot may realize that Rivest and Diffie are actually quite excellent individuals in their field, but these kinds of conflicts of interest are frequently what will be pulled out to counter an argument, rather than working from the facts themselves.