Hello, On Wed, 29 Nov 1995, jim bell wrote:
Wake up, idiot! The purpose of encryption and signing and such is to REDUCE problems, ideally to zero but if not to some adequately small value. To fail to use signing when there is no ongoing problem is risky; to not use signing when there is a serious continuing problem is downright lunatic. That sets up an irresolvable contradiction: On the one hand, you're willing to tolerate a continuing problem, yet on the other you claim that your standards are so high that you won't use a system unless the probability of security essentially precludes a loss of security.
Unfortunately priorities are mixed up here. Reputation should be more important, unless Alice is actually a group of teenagers that are just having fun at the lists expense, and could care less what they write as long as it gets a response. If the writer actually cared about his reputation then a digital signature would be the best way to go, but a different encryption scheme should be used for the signature than the message. Just my $0.02, but if Alice continues to just not care about his reputation, and people can't verify that the same writer(s) wrote it, then maybe ignoring posts would be a good choice. Take care and have fun. ========================================================================== James Black (Comp Sci/Comp Eng sophomore) e-mail: black@eng.usf.edu http://www.eng.usf.edu/~black/index.html **************************************************************************