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@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 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