Actually, I interpret the chemistry professor's comment in a different light.
It would be possible to design a system where:
o the standard end user software doesn't facilitate editing the other person's
text, and
o each piece of text is signed.
The result would be a system where a recipient would know whether the person
who is alleged to have written a piece of the message actually did so, and the
normal mode of use would be to leave things untouched. Or, if you edit someone
else's text, it immediately becomes your text.
Steve
On Sep 9, 2013, at 4:15 PM, Dave Crocker <dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
On 9/9/2013 1:09 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
I've just discovered that when
you forward or reply to a message, you can just change the other
person's text by typing over it! You'd have thought they would
make that impossible."
Yes, they should have made that impossible.
Yeah, the pragmatics of truly independent, distributed processing
environments, with limited resources and fundamental human factors barriers
really are quite shocking.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net