At 18:17 14/02/01 -0800, you wrote:
On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 08:04:45PM +0000, J Adrian Pickering wrote:
> Yes. You must file beforehand. You should also secure your data leading up
> to the filing also (in case of 'diligence' challenges). Self-archiving a
> preprint could be done provided it is encrypted. However, this is not
> necessary. File the *hash* of the preprint only. Then, there there is
> absolutely NO possibility of disclosure whatsoever.
I see. Well I have found a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, and
here is its cryptographic hash key:
qp2938jap98ejrap38fjawp498fjq4pf8jsfpaj34fp8j4f
And if the NSF gives me a grant I will reveal the document that led to
this key.
:-) Perhaps I should say that the hash algorithm has to be a publically
disclosed one at this time, otherwise no one will believe you.
NSF are regarded as a good source of such public algorithms. They've
recently improved their SHA family. You should get a grant if you can
demonstrate improvements!
I have to agree with Stevan that this is not compatible with the purpose
of open scholarly archives. Maybe there should be an archive somewhere
of hash keys of good ideas. But not the arXiv or similar.
It DOES have something to contribute to scholars if they wish to assert
that they had a document, open or otherwise, at a particular instant in
time. We want all documents to be open. However, we have encountered one
instance where it *might* be necessary to publically claim existance of a
closed document before subsequently opening it. I think it is good to know
that a document exists - even if you can't read all of it - than for its
existance to be hidden entirely.
However, yes, our objective is open archives with a provable order of
archiving across the network. I believe hashes have a part to play here
generally. We'll see...
Adrian Pickering/
Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
