[free-sklyarov] An Alternative Line of Argumentation

[Jay Sulzberger]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Dave Sherohman wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 21, 2001 at 08:18:23PM -0400, Cousin Willie wrote:
> > How does it help the cause to have a bunch of "advocates" charge out
> > half-cocked saying "you're too dumb to understand what's going on
> > here, but let me provide this simple analogy", and then proceeding to
> > mumble something about cereal boxes and secret decoders, or books in
> > glass boxes, or Firestone tires?  It seems that you're walking a fine
> > line, risking that the public draws some undesirable conclusions:
>
> You're right.  Coming up with a way to explain the case to random
> passers-by in 30 seconds or less which neither relies upon previous
> knowledge nor comes off as condescending is, to say the least, difficult,
> especially when it deals with something as esoteric as crypto.  If you
> think you can do a better job of it, please do.  A good capsule summary
> of the situation would do us all a lot of good.

Every issue any human being has ever demonstrated about, including
slavery, the death penalty, and the WTO is hard to fully explain in less
than 30 seconds.  Here we have the advantage that the secret decoder ring
is not an analogy, but an implementation of one cipher, the
mono-alphabetic substitution, used by an Adobe partner to "protect the
copyright holder's interests".

oo--JS.