as an aside, PKIs have attempted to moved into the no-value market segment.
as internet and online have become more and more ubiquitous the original offline market segment for PKI has drastically dwindled ... i.e. a certification authority certifying information and freely distributing that certified information for the benefit of parties that don't have access to the information themselves ... i.e. turning them into relying parties, parties that rely on the digital certificates (certification of information by certification authorities). In the past, these relying parties were operations that didn't have their own information and no capability for contacting any authoritative agency directly responsible for the information and/or directly contacting certification authorities. This is my analogy to the the "letters of credit" from the sailing ship days. As internet and online have become more and more ubiquitous (as well as the general decline in dataprocessing costs), situations where parties don't have their own copy of the information and/or aren't directly able to contact somebody with the information ... is rapidly disappearing. What is remaining are operations that still can't justify the cost of thier own copy of the information (rapidly disappearing with the drastic decline in the general cost of dataprocessing) and/or can't justify the cost of directly contacting somebody with the information ... becoming more and more difficult to find such a market niche as the cost of online operation is rapdily declining and becoming ubiquitously available. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
