Challenge to TCPA/Palladium detractors

AARG!Anonymous remailer at aarg.net
Wed Aug 7 15:50:29 EDT 2002


I'd like the Palladium/TCPA critics to offer an alternative proposal
for achieving the following technical goal:

  Allow computers separated on the internet to cooperate and share data
  and computations such that no one can get access to the data outside
  the limitations and rules imposed by the applications.

In other words, allow a distributed network application to create a
"closed world" where it has control over the data and no one can get
the application to "cheat".  IMO this is clearly the real goal of TCPA
and Palladium, in technical terms, when stripped of all the emotional
rhetoric.

As I posted previously, this concept works especially well for open source
applications.  You could even have each participant compile the program
himself, but still each app can recognize the others on the network and
cooperate with them.  And this way all the participants can know that
the applications aren't doing anything different than what they claim.

This would be a very powerful capability with many uses that you might
find both good and bad.  I posted a long message earlier with three
examples of privacy-oriented applications: secure game playing, anonymous
P2P networking, and untraceable digital cash.  In addition it can be used
for DRM, restricting access to sensitive business or government data,
and similar applications.

For those of you who claim that such a technology is not necessarily
objectionable in itself, but that the implementations in TCPA and
Palladium are flawed, please explain how you could do it better.  How can
you maximize user control and privacy and minimize the potential for
government or corporate takeovers?

In other words, what *exactly* is wrong with the way that TCPA and
Palladium choose to do things?  Can you fix those problems and still
achieve the basic goal, above?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com



More information about the cryptography mailing list