Dan Geer wrote:
Over the last six months, I'd discovered that Carl Ellison (Intel), Joan Feigenbaum (Yale) and I agreed on at least one thing: that the problem statements for "privacy" and for "digital rights management" were identical,
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... YMMV.
Uhhh, my mileage varies rather considerably. Perhaps we are using wildly divergent notions of "privacy" -- or wildly divergent notions of "identical". DRM has to do mainly with protecting certain rights to _published_ material. Private material is not "identical" with published material -- it is more opposite than identical. Private material is, according to the usual definitions, in the hands of persons who have a common interest in keeping the information private and restricted. Published material, in contrast, is in the hands of persons who have no interest in keeping it private, and indeed commonly have an interest in defeating whatever restrictions are in place. We have thousands of years of experience with military crypto, where the parties at both ends of the conversation are highly motivated to restrict the flow of private information. The current state of this technology is very robust. Ending about 20 years ago we had a 500-year era where it was not practical for anyone except an established publisher to infringe copyrights in a big way. During this era, Rights Management had essentially nothing to do with crypto; it mainly had to do with the economics of printing presses and radio transmitters, supplemented by copyright laws that were more-or-less enforceable. This era was killed by analog means (widespread photocopy machines) and the corpse was pulverized by digital means (widespread computers and networking). I repeat: The main features of our experience with Privacy Management are disjoint from the main features of our experience with Publishers' Rights Management. They are about as different as different can be. The record is replete with spectacular failures attributable to non-understanding of the difference. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@wasabisystems.com