Like any new technology, selling crypto to the public will be difficult at first. I'll bet the telephone, something so vital to today's society it is difficult to imagine functioning without it, was tough to get going. PROPONENT: "Just imagine the service and convenience!" OPPONENT: "What services and conveniences? I visit the people I want to talk to and conduct my business withing 5 miles of home." At the time there were no neat services or conveniences. Buying into new technology will cause resistance, since people are not going to miss what they do not have. However, I think some crypto technology will be easier to sell than others. It should be easy to convince people of the need for good encryption, the kind that can protect you or your company's financial information, mail, ideas, etc. Also, digital signatures and authentication techniques should face little resistance. Now, anonymous remailers and other privacy methods will be a little harder :-) (witness the debate over anonymous speech occuring right now!) On a related note, it is amazing how much information about you exists. Did anyone else watch a PBS documentary about this (sorry, I can't remember the name of it)? In the report, a writer researched how direct mail marketing departments seek out infomation - from going to the county court house and obtaining property and deed information, to using census information to classify your living habits, professional organizations you belong to, catalogs for mailing lists of various interests, etc. Some supermarkets were even testing a system in which your purchases (scanned by the bar code reader) are saved and indexed by your credit card or check! Banks could then sell this extremely valuable information to direct mail houses. /-----------------------------------\ | Karl L. Barrus | | elee9sf@menudo.uh.edu | <- preferred address | barrus@tree.egr.uh.edu (NeXTMail) | \-----------------------------------/
Like any new technology, selling crypto to the public will be difficult at first. I'll bet the telephone, something so vital to today's society it is difficult to imagine functioning without it, was tough to get going.
For an interesting look at this, see _When Old Technologies Were New_; I've forgotten the author. It's about electrification and the telephone. And remember, just because there's opposition, it could still be a bad idea! :-) Let's not get too self-congratulatory here.
On a related note, it is amazing how much information about you exists. [...] Some supermarkets were even testing a system in which your purchases (scanned by the bar code reader) are saved and indexed by your credit card or check!
It really is unsettling. There is, in fact, a speculative market in personal information. Some of these companies doing supermarket systems had the collection systems developed, and then went looking for customers. Eric
On a related note, it is amazing how much information about you exists. Did anyone else watch a PBS documentary about this (sorry, I can't remember the name of it)? In the report, a writer researched how direct mail marketing departments seek out infomation - from going to the county court house and obtaining property and deed information, to using census information to classify your living habits, professional organizations you belong to, catalogs for mailing lists of various interests, etc. Some supermarkets were even testing a system in which your purchases (scanned by the bar code reader) are saved and indexed by your credit card or check! Banks could then sell this extremely valuable information to direct mail houses.
Check out the books "Privacy for Sale" and "The Naked Consumer" for thorough treatments of this topic. Or read the *.privacy groups for a while.... Peter
participants (3)
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Eric Hughes -
Karl Barrus -
Peter Breton