From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 12:31:33 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote:
>...
>To demonstrate: lets say I submit a FOIA request for all documents on
>UFOs in government archives. I can determine, for example, that while
>the USAF might have several hundred thousand documents on them, which
>you'd expect for a department that had defending our skies as its job,
>if, say, the Department of the Interior had a billion documents on the
>same topic, I'd see that as rather odd and deserving of greater
>investigation.
>
>A tcpa compliant system would not be able to conveniently 'lose'
>documents, as has happened so much in the past. They might not give you
>access to them, or access to unredacted versions, but you should be
>able to know that they exist.
>...
>
>
I suspect very strongly that you are wrong. If I have read the specs
correctly, it could easily "loose" documents. And also create documents
that could not be read after a certain date, more than so many time, if
some particular file (key) were changed. Etc. It could be very useful
to those who wanted to create documents that could only be read under
certain specified conditions. (Well, so could many other techniques.
Nothing new here, really.) So to me it looks more like the opposite of
what you are claiming.
I haven't yet seen any advantage to the "owner" of the hardware.
"owner" is in quotes, because I don't think that you can really be
considered to own something that you can't use. Unless, that is, you
think that a new way of rendering your documents unreadable is desireable.
What is does do is create an really nifty way for some company that
sells a OS (or other software) to rig things you that if you don't
upgrade your software at the appropriate time, not only can you not read
them on your computer, but you can't read them on any other, either.
But then a certain software company is already essentially claiming to
own any documents that you create using their software, if you actually
read the EULA. So it's not your documents that you can't read. And
it's already illegal to distribute or use any "circumvention" measure.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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