| >http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6993661 | | Gee, the inventor is Simson Garfinkel, who's written a bunch of books | including Database Nation, published in 2000 by O'Reilly, about all | the way the public and private actors are spying on us. | | I wonder whether this was research to see how hard it was to | get the PTO to grant an absurd patent. Alternatively, it could be an attempt to preempt any other patents in this area. We'll have to see what Garfinkle does with the patent.
BTW, I don't see this as an example of an absurd patent. There might well be prior art, but the idea of erasing information by deliberately discarding a key is certainly not completely obvious except in retrospect. If you look at any traditional crypto text, you won't find anything of this sort - it wasn't the kind of thing people had worried about until fairly recently. -- Jerry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]