On 2013-01-05 9:31 AM, Ryan Sleevi wrote:
On Fri, January 4, 2013 3:06 pm, James A. Donald wrote:
On 2013-01-05 8:05 AM, Ryan Sleevi wrote
Can you explain how, exactly, incumbents leverage any power to keep new
entrants out?
Such behavior is necessarily a deviation from official truth, from the
way certification is supposed to work, thus the only way to observe such
behavior would be if emails leaked, as in the climategate files where we
saw how peer review actually worked..
Analogously, regulators, financial audits and ratings agencies were
supposed to ensure that banks only invested in safe stuff. When the
proverbial hit the fan, it became apparent that regulators, financial
audits and ratings agencies in practice ensured that banks only invested
in politically correct stuff, but no one can explain how, exactly, this
happened - well it is pretty obvious how it happened, and one can make a
pretty good guess how it happened, but there is no direct official
evidence as to how it happened.
While I appreciate a good bit of paranoia and tin-foil hat wagging as much
as the next person, I think your analogy breaks down pretty critically.
In the case you referenced, it was the role of auditors and regulators to
keep people out / keep people honest, and they failed, and so more people
/ dishonest people got in.
Regulators such as Jon Corzine?
They did not "fail". In the US most of the money that was pissed away
in the great financial crisis was not pissed away on financial
engineering, splitting derivatives, and enriching bankers, but on
rewarding targeted voting blocks and specific get-out-the-vote
organizations - from which may infer what went on behind the scenes,
plus some small amount of what went on behind the scenes has been
revealed, leading to the suspicion that behind the scenes, it was all
like that.
However, the speculation about CA collusion
requires the CAs to be working hard to keep new entrants out - the exact
*opposite* behaviour.
Long established bankers, such as Angelo Mozillo, heading long
established banks, made dud loans and bribed government employees to
take the loans off his hands at face value, Who were these new
entrants of which you speak? Jon Corzine?
Similarly, long established CAs, such as verisign, presumably bribe
existing browser teams.
_______________________________________________
cryptography mailing list
cryptography@randombit.net
http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
