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Why SSL was renamed to TLS in late 90s (2014)
The Netscape/Microsoft browser wars in the mid-90's were really vicious and competitive. They really had it out for each other. Netscape had...
SSL 2 had some flaws, both cryptographic and practical; not dramatic enough to make replacing it a crisis, but it clearly needed some work from early on. Various people in the industry & community didn't want a fork, so we (Consensus Development, where I worked with Christopher Allen at the time, and where I had written the SSL 3.0 reference implementation under contract to Netscape) hosted a meeting between representatives from Netscape and Microsoft; I forget everyone who was there, but I recall that Bruce Schneier was there (before he was famous), and probably Paul Kocher, who had designed the SSL 3 protocol; Barbara Fox represented Microsoft. And we negotiated a deal where Microsoft and Netscape would both support the IETF taking over the protocol and standardizing it in an open process, which led to me editing the RFC.
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