On 13 Jan 2005, at 10:46 pm, Tim Bray wrote:
1. A stream of financial disclosures from a public company in a highly-regulated industry. The legislation is very clear that they may not say anything in public unaccompanied by disclaimers and limitation-of-liability statements. The financial industry gets together an introduces an extension that requests clients to display these disclaimers in a fashion that meets the regulatory requirements. If Atom has MustUnderstand, compliant clients that can't do this will never fail to display the appropriate material, and this reduces the risk of litigation and makes it more likely that such feeds will be created.
I can't imagine these people would use mustUnderstand to do that. If it's important, they'll want to put it in content too.
2. A stream of information that uses a special-purpose digital-signature scheme to establish the authenticity of the information. People should not act on this information without checking the signature. A person using a conformant Atom client can be sure that they won't see anything that hasn't been checked.
Um, couldn't the malicious person easily remove the mustUnderstand element while they're adding spoofed information?
Can you try a bit harder with number 3?
Graham
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
