Re: About social balances

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

All:

It would be a great pleasure to continue this discussion, but I do not
have time to do that right now. I do not think that resolving our
differences of philosophy is necessary in order to work together.

While our reasons differ, here are the things on which we agree:

  - DRM is not something that any of us think we want to
    explicitly support.
  - Privacy is something that we all *do* want to support.
  - We have agreed that if it is possible to build a system
    on which privacy can be sustained and DRM cannot, then
    Hurd should do so.
  - We do not know whether some technical means exists that
    allows us to do one and not the other. I suspect that
    there is not.

I suggest that the philosophy discussion is much less important than the
last point, and we should focus our attention on this point.

However, I would note one additional point: we cannot compel users to
install Hurd, and if the TPM/TCPA chips come to have widespread use then
we will lose our ability to do disk forensics on Windows installations.

In my next note, I will explain why I think that the DRM problem and the
privacy problem are ultimately the same problem. We can then test this.

In the meantime, let give at least one very strong opinion that I think
we will agree on:

  There are scenarios where it might make sense for Hurd to support
  encrypted disks -- for example to prevent use of data if a laptop
  is stolen.

  In these scenarios, Hurd should ensure that the person performing
  the system installation has an opportunity to make an offline copy of
  the encryption key so that they can do forensics or recovery on their
  own disk. [I say "opportunity" because I cannot compel them to write
  the key down.]

shap