[plug] MS Curriculum at schools and TAFEs ...

[The Thought Assassin]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Christian wrote:
> My understanding is that if you patent something then you must
> describe how it works even though you then retain control over its use.

Yep. The whole point of the patent system was to reward people for
describing things rather than keeping them a secret.

> By keeping it a trade secret I think they couldn't actually patent it.

Yep. They would not make that choice today.

> > All of them no doubt relying on legislative protection at a fundamental
> > level, not presenting an effective technological solution. Except for the
> > ones relying on secrecy and Oh-god-I-hope-noone-reverse-engineers this.
> > Or am I wrong?
> In particular, one group who were working on protecting Java applets so
> they couldn't be reverse engineered and/or stolen. I wasn't entirely
> convinced but the paper was generally well-received.

Do you recall the basic idea or have a reference?

> > ...and when CDs are obsolete and all music is sold in formats decryptable
> > only under Windows, what will you do then? We should all care about this.
> How do you propose to make a file only "decryptable" under Windows?  If
> possible this would violate Kerchhoff's assumption that security reside
> only in the key. At which stage someone (anyone) reverse engineers
> Windows, posts the recovered key (or algorithm) to USENET and suddenly
> it's all down the tubes.