On Tue, 02 Jun 1992 17:36:59 -0700, Marshall Rose wrote:
Hence, a UA doing both PEM&MIME must, Must, MUST provide the option for
full- and. component- privacy.
Abraham Lincoln was once asked to sign a bill he felt would be unenforcable.
So, he asked the bill's backers, "If I say that a sheep's tail is a leg, how
many legs does a sheep have?"
"Five," said the puzzled solons.
"No," Lincoln replied sadly, "a sheep still has four legs. *Calling* a tail a
leg does not make it one."
The point of this (true) parable is to point out that no matter what sort of
well-intentioned declarations may be made, there is still no guarantee that
that is how it will work out. I believe that a PEM implementor would be
sorely tempted to cut corners and do a `full-privacy only' implementation.
I would (again) like to suggest that design work be done that would tend to
encourage implementors to do the right thing, rather than giving them `rules'
that they'll consider have no purpose other than to be rebelled against. I
think this will happen only if component privacy is seen as the more generally
useful model. I am convinced that in the present situation the PEM people
will not see it that way, and will tend to prefer the full privacy model to
the exclusion of the component privacy model unless work is done to make the
component privacy model desirable.
-- Mark --