[44160] in Cypherpunks
Re: key for Alice as promised (not)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James Black)
Wed Nov 29 14:57:55 1995
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 14:47:18 -0500 (EST)
From: James Black <black@sunflash.eng.usf.edu>
To: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <m0tKrau-00090tC@pacifier.com>
Hello,
On Wed, 29 Nov 1995, jim bell wrote:
> Wake up, idiot! The purpose of encryption and signing and such is to REDUCE
> problems, ideally to zero but if not to some adequately small value. To
> fail to use signing when there is no ongoing problem is risky; to not use
> signing when there is a serious continuing problem is downright lunatic.
> That sets up an irresolvable contradiction: On the one hand, you're willing
> to tolerate a continuing problem, yet on the other you claim that your
> standards are so high that you won't use a system unless the probability of
> security essentially precludes a loss of security.
Unfortunately priorities are mixed up here. Reputation should be more
important, unless Alice is actually a group of teenagers that are just
having fun at the lists expense, and could care less what they write as
long as it gets a response. If the writer actually cared about his
reputation then a digital signature would be the best way to go, but a
different encryption scheme should be used for the signature than the
message.
Just my $0.02, but if Alice continues to just not care about his
reputation, and people can't verify that the same writer(s) wrote it,
then maybe ignoring posts would be a good choice.
Take care and have fun.
==========================================================================
James Black (Comp Sci/Comp Eng sophomore)
e-mail: black@eng.usf.edu
http://www.eng.usf.edu/~black/index.html
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