well the original post wasn't so much about bringing down microsoft but being able to patent DRM processes and transactions.
for the past 4-5 years the have been repeated articles and press releases that DRM is the silver bullet for electronic commerce and payments on the internet. A simple summary of past DRM articles would be that when (and if) DRM payment transactions on the internet takes off ... that there will be ten times as many DRM payment transaction as all other payment transactions combined .... and that whatever internet payment implementation emerges for DRM would come to dominate the whole payment industry (not just internet payments). Whether you believe the thesis as true or not ... DRM related matters tend to get some play in the payments industry. The area of internet payments tends to include things like major market niches that would result in payments on the internet .... in addition to what might be the best possible technical solution for doing payments on the internet (the DRM assurtion would be that it doesn't make any difference what the best possible solution is ... whatever emerges for DRM will dominate). so to follow random thread drifts ... we can revert to one of the previous questions as to whether identity or payment is more important in payments. simplifying a previous scenario http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aepay10.htm#76 Invisible ink, e-signatures slow to broadly catch on lets say i walk into a store in frankfurt to get a black leather coat. the clerk has an option to do one: A) have me insert my passport that has a chip with a x.509v3 identity certificate and do an online OCSP transaction to see if I'm still me B) have me insert my payment chip card and do an online x9.59/iso8583 payment transaction to see if they are going to get paid. In the DRM world of possible enormous numbers of small transactions ... there is important issue of both efficiency and security. In the past there was some thot that efficiency significantly dominated security. However there are issues about using electronic technology to fraudulently aggregate large numbers of small value DRM transactions resulting in extremely huge sums. [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 12/22/2002 6:43 am wrote: Being relatively uninterested in bringing down Microsoft, but extremely interested in the key to secure commerce, I wonder if someone can shed some more light on this "fantastic" technology that took more that 3 years to productify? http://www.intertrust.com/main/overview/trustcomputing.html Paying $400M for a 39-person company seems a bit steep these days but who knows.... Anders
