On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 20:11, Ron Mayer wrote: [snip] > That's unlikely to work anyway. Organizations protecting valuable data > using technical approaches (DVDs, etc) find it gets out anyway. > Since you'll ship a client that can decrypt the data anyway, anyone with > a debugger could decrypt it (unless you only want it to run on Trusted > computing platform / palladium computers). Hmm, I do hope those techniques will never be good enough to stop hackers cracking them. But this is a philosophical and off topic question... the point is, I don't believe there is any kind of software/hardware out there that can't be cracked once it gets in hostile hands. On to the off topic thing, I really think all data should be legally forced to be free... research would have to change and maybe stumble a bit in the beginning, but I'm completely sure all interested parties would be forced to better cooperate and that would boost the advancement of science in the long term. Hiding research results will not work these days, so companies would be forced to do it in cooperation with all other players... of course not convenient for todays big corporations, but maybe they should disappear anyway. Cheers, Csaba.