RE: Design principles and ethics

[Christopher Nelson]

> On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 01:35:20PM -0600, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> > > > If I wrote a program that I wished to keep for myself, I might 
> > > > encode into it a way to make sure that only I am 
> running it.  If 
> > > > someone then steals my private program, what is essentially my 
> > > > property, they can benefit from it without my consent.  You are 
> > > > enabling theft without repercussion.
> > > 
> > > If you keep it to yourself, only you have access to it anyways. I 
> > > don't see a problem here.
> > 
> > Then please re-read the message.  The program is *STOLEN* from me.  
> > That is a problem.
> 
> So how did this "theft" (which I don't agree it is, but 
> anyway) happen?

I don't know.  If I did, it wouldn't be theft as I would have PREVENTED
it from happening.  

Are you saying that you believe that any work a person creates is
automatically public property?

>  And why do you think a confined constructor 
> is capable of preventing it?

If I know that no one can examine AND MODIFY my data, then I can make
assumptions regarding the legitimacy of that data.  If I know that
someone can examine, but not modify, that gives me a little more
security.

Consider Diffie-Helman key exchange.

If Moriarty can both examine and modify the line of communication
between Alice and Bob, they cannot guarantee that their communication is
private.  For example, Alice generates her part of the key and sends it
to Bob.  However, Moriarty intercepts this key, generates one of his
own, and sends it to Bob instead.  He does the same thing when Bob
replies to Alice.  He is now able to read all of the data that Alice and
Bob send to each other.

On the other hand, if Moriarty can only read the datastream, then Alice
and Bob can generate exchange a set of partial keys such that Moriarty
can get no useful information from the data stream.

-={C}=-