On 09/08/2013 12:08 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > I doubt that safety is, per se, anything the market demands from > cars, food, houses, etc.
I wouldn't have said that. It's a lot more complicated than that. For one thing, there are lots of different "people". However, as a fairly-general rule, people definitely do consider safety as part of their purchasing decisions. -- Why do you think there are layers of tamper-evident packaging on Tylenol (and lots of other things)? Note that I was not kidding when I suggested tamper-evident data security measures. Not only do responsible vendors want the product to be safe when it leaves the factor, they want to make sure it /stays/ safe. -- Any purchaser with an ounce of sense will hire an inspector to check over a house before putting down a deposit. Sales contracts require the seller to disclose any known defects, and generally provide some sort of warranty. ++ Forsooth, if people bought crypto as carefully as they buy houses, we'd all be a lot better off. -- In many cases, consumers do not -- and cannot -- /directly/ evaluate safety and quality, so they rely on third parties. One familiar example is the airline industry. The airlines generally /like/ being regulated by the FAA because by and large the good guys already exceed FAA safety standards, and they don't want some bad guy coming in and giving the whole industry a bad name. -- I imagine food and drug safety is similar, although the medical industry complains about over-regulation more than I would have expected. -- There are also non-governmental evaluation agencies, such as Underwriters' Laboratories and Earth Island Institute. ** There are of course /some/ people who court disaster. For example, there are folks who consider seatbelt laws and motorcycle helmet laws to be oppressive government regulation. These are exceptions to the trends discussed above, but they do not invalidate the overall trends. !! Note that even if you are doing everything you know how to do, you can still get sued on the grounds of negligence and deception if something goes wrong ... especially (but not only) if you said it was safer than it was. Example: Almost every plane crash ever. Let's be clear: A lot of consumer "demands" for safety are made retroactively. "Caveat emptor" has been replaced by /caveat vendor/. _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography