Re: Superdistribution development/release

[Steve Schear <schear@lvdi.net>]

At 5:16 AM +0100 12/4/1997, Lucky Green wrote:
>On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>> 
>> Persistent Cryptographic Wrappers (RightsWrapper) - No matter where the
>> digital document (financial newsletter, educational test, minutes from a
>> court proceeding, sensitive health care records, etc.) goes, no matter
>> how it gets there, whether it is used and then subsequently
>> redistributed, etc. the document is always encrypted.  It is never left
>> decrypted and exposed even while it is being viewed.
>
>They have lost their mind. Since humans are notoriously bad at performing
>decryptions in their head in real time, whatever is sent to the display
>*must* be cleartext. Any competent programmer can grab it at that point.

Undoubetedly there will be attempts to create display chips with built-in decryption and special display and/or raster/vectorizing approaches which are comfortably viewed but are difficult to snap shot using "screen shooters" or simple capture hardware.  With the new USB and FireWire interface standards this isn't too far fetched.  All, as you say probably doomed to failure.

--Steve