[Cryptography] When your security is too secure

[Peter Gutmann]

Jon Callas <jon at callas.org> writes:

>Part of the point of a diary is that your grandchildren will read your salty
>words about your mother, and that is part of the catharsis. There's also an
>old Lincoln anecdote where he encourages someone to write their unvarnished
>criticism, and rewrite it several times until there's no varnish. Then you
>burn the letter.

I think most diaries are like this as well, no-one is ever going to read
hundreds of pages of notes on someone else's life, particularly if they're
written in barely-legible scrawl, unless it's the biographer of someone
famous.  So probably most diaries will default to the Lincoln's-letter effect,
especially if it's written journal-style where it just records the major
happenings of the day for future reference by the author.  And in that case A
> C (I irrelevant), because you want a record of what happened last October
but don't really care who knows that was when you bought a new laptop.

Peter.