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Re: [saag] [Cfrg] Further MD5 breaks: Creating a rogueCAcertificate

2009-01-08 12:47:45

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 09:11:21AM -0600, Eric Gray wrote:
      As a result, some organizations already pay for news-feeds
from known (verifiably) reliable sources. Because on-line news is
also valuable because it's quickly delivered.  No matter how you 
get it, it's not necessarily free.

Some do; some of us even subscribe to dead-tree versions of the
newspapers even though we do most of our reading on-line, on the
general theory that it's good public policy to support the Fourth
Estate (since they serve a critical function keeping the government
honest), even though we do most of our news reading online.  The
problem is very few people are willing to pay for on-line news when
they can get the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com (and many
other news sources) for free.

      As the Heinlein acronym "TANSTAAFL" says, there ain't no
such thing as a free lunch.  And I suspect that an increasingly
large number of people are coming to really understand that.

Yes, but there are a huge number of people who are used to receiving a
lot of these services either for free, or bundled into prices (which
have gotten cheaper as a result of e-commerce).  This is basically the
classic Tragedy of the Commons problem; how many people can *honestly*
say that they've never gone to Best Buy or Circuit City to examine
some device or gadget in person, and then gone on to buy it on-line
because it was cheaper?  And did so even though it should be *obvious*
that the TANSTAAFL principle applied, and would in the long-run lead
to the weakening or disappearance of the bricks-and-morter stores?

                                         - Ted