6.10.1. "Why don't most people pay more attention to security
issues?"
- Fact is, most people never think about real security.
- Safe manufacturers have said that improvements in safes
(the metal kind) were driven by insurance rates. A direct
incentive to spend more
money to improve security (cost of better safe < cost of
higher insurance rate).
- Right now there is almost no economic incentive for people
to worry
about PIN security, about protecting their files, etc.
(Banks eat the
costs and pass them on...any bank which tried to save a few
bucks in
losses by requiring 10-digit PINs--which people would
*write down*
anyway!--would lose customers. Holograms and pictures on
bank cards
are happening because the costs have dropped enough.)
- Crypto is economics. People will begin to really care when
it costs them.
6.10.2. What motivates an attackers is not the intrinsic value of the
data but his perception of the value of the data.
6.10.3. Crypto allows more refinement of permissions...access to
groups, lists
- beyond such crude methods as banning domain names or "edu"
sorts of accounts
6.10.4. these general reasons will make encryption more common, more
socially and legally acceptable, and will hence make eventual
attempts to limit the use of crypto anarchy methods moot
6.10.5. protecting reading habits..
- (Imagine using your MicroSoftCashCard for library
checkouts...)
6.10.6. Downsides
- loss of trust
- markets in unsavory things
- espionage
+ expect to see new kinds of con jobs
- confidence games
- "Make Digital Money Fast"
6.10.7. Encryption of Video Signals and Encryption to Control Piracy
- this is of course a whole technology and industry
- Videocypher II has been cracked by many video hackers
- a whole cottage industry in cracking such cyphers
- note that outlawing encryption would open up many
industries to destruction by piracy, which is yet another
reason a wholesale ban on encryption is doomed to failure
By Tim May, see README
HTML by Jonathan Rochkind