Re: Bruce Schneier Gets It Wrong

On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 15:09:31 +0000 (UTC), daw@taverner.cs.berkeley.edu
(David Wagner) wrote, in part:

>By the way, I don't understand what you think Bruce Schneier got wrong.

What I had thought he got wrong, I thought, was obvious - referring to
the scheme as 'new'. But you may be right that there were details
omitted in the article that would have made it novel. Also, another
reply to my post indicated that Mr. Schneier *had* dealt with schemes
involving similar principles before.

I have the utmost respect for Bruce Schneier, and his knowledge of
general principles of security as well as of modern cryptography. But,
while my own knowledge in this area is dilettantish compared to his, I
do think that at least when it comes to trivia about old-time
cryptography, I have some advantages. Such as in identifying which rotor
machines some recently declassified NSA patents pertain to.

However, his record *is* pretty good.

The only *other* instance in which I felt he got something just plain
wrong is in a remark about the text of the DMCA, where he wondered if
the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing technical devices that
"effectively prevent the unauthorized copying of copyrighted material"
means that it's legal to circumvent such measures if they don't work
very well.

Neither of us are lawyers, but I was disappointed he didn't recognize
that the word "effectively" was being used there in a different sense.
Instead of in the usual sense, of "bringing about a desired result", it
was being used in a sense related to the phrase "in effect". And the
reason it was there was because an encryption chip in a DVD player
cannot form an *intent* to prevent the unauthorized copying of
copyrighted material - it knows nothing of authorization or copyrights,
it just manipulates bits.

The word was there, therefore, to *make* the law hold up in court, and
it *wasn't* some sort of stupid mistake that could be used to make the
thing fall apart. Since he runs a big company, he must have one or two
lawyers working for him who could easily have told him that.

John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
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Received on Mon May 1 01:54:15 2006