Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Why is RMI Java-only? Who does *that* serve?
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 10/19/1999; 7:44:34 PM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 12180 (In response to 12147) Prev/Next: 12179 / 12181
Dennis Peterson wrote:Those E guys are ambitious. They basically want to replace much of our current legal framework with secure code. Think they can do it?
I'm not sure that I agree that they "want to replace much of our current legal framework with secure code." It does seem fair to say that they've got a goodly chunk of contract law in their sights. I don't know how much of our legal framework falls into that category, however.
In any case, to me, it makes perfect sense to say "distributed computing has to deal with the necessity of allowing two or more mutually distrustful pieces of code to meaningfully interact; contract law has to deal with the necessity of allowing two or more mutually distrustful parties to meaningfully interact; why not try to make the former ability address the latter where possible?" Consider, for example, the case of nuclear non-proliferation treaty testing: you have a classic case of two mutually distrustful parties, both of whom wish to stick measuring devices--geiger counters and whatnot--in each other's sovereign soil for the purpose of verification. Each side wants to ensure that these measuring devices get the data, and only the data, that has been agreed to within the context of the treaty. Conversely but similarly, each side wishes to ensure that the data they are in receipt of has not been falsififed in any way. This is a perfect application for the kind of technology the E team is developing.
Or consider the financial realm of securities exchanges and the like. There's a burning need to ensure that a wide variety of financial instruments carry the value that they are purported to by the human beings doing the exchanging while keeping opportunities for forgery, counterfeiting, and other forms of fraud as low as humanly possible. This is the sort of thing that digital cash or, more generally, "digital contracts with bearer" neatly addresses.
Did you read all the press coverage about poor Staples and their ultra-naive coupon promotion where they simply distributed a five-digit number that, when provided to their web site, gained the user a $20 discount? The number made the rounds on the web and Usenet, and Staples got ripped off blind. That sort of thing is also trivially addressed by the kind of technology that E provides. (The Staples case is especially frustrating because you could easily treat it as a special case of digital cash: just generate a unique ID for the promotion, concatenate it with the coupon recipient's e-mail address, encipher that with the public key of a key-pair, and send it to the recipient. When you receive a digital coupon at the web site, decipher it with your private key, look up the e-mail address and promotion ID in the database, and mark the coupon as "redeemed" for that promotion and user. If you get the same promotion ID and e-mail address more than once, you know that user has been passing the coupon around).
So I guess the answer to the question you didn't ask--"Is E a good technology base to build a replacement for large chunks of contract law on?"--is yes.
The answer to the question "Can the E team effect such a replacement?" is "I don't know, but I intend to help them try."
Thanks for reading,
Paul Snively
psnively@earthlink.net
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