-- John Kelsey
What's with the heat-death nonsense? Physical bearer instruments imply stout locks and vaults and alarm systems and armed guards and all the rest, all the way down to infrastructure like police forces and armies (private or public) to avoid having the biggest gang end up owning all the gold. Electronic bearer instruments imply the same kinds of things, and the infrastructure for that isn't in place. It's like telling people to store their net worth in their homes, in gold. That can work, but you probably can't leave the cheapest lock sold at Home Depot on your front door and stick the gold coins in the same drawer where you used to keep your checkbook.
Some of us get spyware more than others. Further, genuinely secure systems are now becoming available, notably Symbian. While many people are rightly concerned that DRM will ultimately mean that the big corporation, and thus the state, has root access to their computers and the owner does not, it also means that trojans, viruses, and malware does not. DRM enables secure signing of transactions, and secure storage of blinded valuable secrets, since DRM binds the data to the software, and provides a secure channel to the user. So secrets representing ID, and secrets representing value, can only be manipulated by the software that is supposed to be manipulating it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 3CepcQ59MYKAZTizEycP1vkZBbexwbyiobaC/bXS 44hfxMF4PBKXmc5uavnegOFFCMtNwDmpIMxLBcyI3