Re: Verilog encryption broken

["George A. Gleason" <gg@well.sf.ca.us>]

Re Mark's question about the ethics of revealing that a proprietary system
is crackable:

I believe there is every right and duty to make the vulnerability publicly
known.  However, this can be done without disclosing enough of the content
of the badly-protected information as to come in for heat.  For example, one
might post little snippets of a source code file which by themselves aren't
usable but which the original owners will instangly recognise.  This would
be akin to the "fair use" of quotations from literature and poetry in
critical reviews.  And I also believe it would stand up in court, because
the material which was revealed in the quotations could not be used in and
of itself to devalue the content of the original complete work.  

-gg