On 08/27/2010 12:38 AM, Richard Salz wrote:
(For what it's worth, I find your style of monocase and ellipses so incredibly difficult to read that I usually delete your postings unread.)
It is well studied. I had gotten blamed for online computer conferencing on the internal network in the late 70s and early 80s (rumor is that when the executive committee became aware ... 5of6 wanted to immediately fire me ... supposedly there was only one holdout). somewhat as a result, there was a researcher paid to sit in the back of my office for nine months, taking notes on how I communicated, face-to-face, telephone, computer ... got copies of all incoming and outgoing email, logs of all instant messages, etc. Besides being a corporate research report, it was also the basis for several papers, books and stanford phd (joint between language and computer AI). One number was that I avg. electronic communication with 275 different people per week for the 9month period. lots of past posts mentioning computer mediated communication http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#cmc in any case, we were brought in to help wordsmith the cal. state electronic signature legislation. the certification authority industry was heavily lobbying (effectively) that digital certificates had to be mandated for every adult. The certification authority industry, besides doing the SSL domain name digital certificates were out pitching to wall street money people a $20B/annum business case (basically all adults with $100/annum digital certificate). Initially they appeared to believe that the financial industry would underwrite the certificates. The financial industry couldn't see the justification for the $20B/annum transfer of wealth to the certification authentication industry. There were various attempts then to convince consumers that they should pay it directly out of their own pocket. in payment area, they were also pitching to the merchants that part of deploying digital certificates infrastructure, the burden of proof in digitally signed payment transactions, would be switched to consumers (somewhat like UK where approx. that has happened as part of payment hardware tokens). That netted out to consumers paying $100/annum (for digital certificates), out of their own pocket, for the privilege of having the burden of proof in disputes shifted to them. that didn't sell ... so there was heavy lobbying all around the world wanting gov mandating digital certificates for every adult (payed for by the individual). The lawyers working on the cal. legislation explained why digital signatures didn't meet the criteria for "human signatures" (demonstration of human having read, agreed, authorizes, and/or approved) needed by electronic signature legislation. we got some patents in the area, the 32nd just granted on tuesday, they are all assigned, we have no interest and have been long gone for years. There are a couple issues with new technology uptake ... much more successful when 1) there is no incumbent technology already in the niche and 2) there are strong champions with profit motivation and 3) there is at least some perceived benefit. In the 90s, I would pontificate how SSL domain name certificates didn't actually provide any significant security ... but were "comfort" certificates (for consumers), aka benefit was significantly a matter of publicity. Better solutions that come along later don't necessarily win ... having incumbent to deal with and are especially at a disadvantage if there aren't major champions (typically with strong profit motivation). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [email protected]
