From: nobody@huge.cajones.com (Huge Cajones Remailer)
Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 12:18:58 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Homer on Terrorism
Message-ID: <199706160400.VAA09858@fat.doobie.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Tom Weinstein wrote:
> Tim May wrote:
> > Tom Weinstein wrote:
> >> Tim May wrote:
> >
> >>> (What the Danes offered was a straight buiness deal, albeit made
> >>> weirder and more frantic by the constraints of time, publicity, and
> >>> worldwide attention. Still a business deal, though.)

> what he said
> was something like:
>   "Pay me lots of money or I will go to the press in such a way as to
>    damage you the most."
> 
> That is blackmail.  It's clear that the money is to prevent the damage,
> not just for the information.

  This happens every day in major-league business ballparks. Information
--> is power is --> money. Usually the word "blackmail" surfaces when
one
company takes a shit-kicking from the other company.

  Methinks the reason the word "blackmail" so easily springs to the
lips of Netscape exec's is that they know they got caught with their
pants down.
  They designed their code so that they or John Law could put their
dicks in our hard drives and wiggle them around and now they are
accusing the guy who has "pictures" of their guilt of doing something
dirty.

  Although Netscape is claiming the "high ground" by saying they
don't pay "blackmail," I think it is much more likely that they
didn't need to *pay* for the information because they already
*knew* exactly what the other company had discovered.
  Netscape calls their upcoming patch a "bug fix" when, in reality,
it is the disabling of a "secret feature." Thus I wouldn't be too
quick to accept their definition of "blackmail."

> > Browsers are big business, and high stakes poker. It's not surprising
> > to me to see this kind of bluffing and "terorrism" (to quote Homer,
> > with his rosy-fingered typing). What's surprising is that it hasn't
> > happened more often, or at least hasn't gotten as much publicity.

  It probably doesn't get reported very often because a company
usually doesn't have foreknowledge of the problem (i.e. it is a
genuine "bug" in their product) and thus it is in their best
interest to pay to find out the specifics of the problem.
  When you're innocent of wrongdoing, it's called a business
negotiation. When you're guilty of wrongdoing, its called
blackmail?
  So if Tom Weinstein calls it blackmail, then I guess that pretty
much indicates Netscape's position in regard to their browser's
ability to be used to compromise the user's privacy and security.

TruthMonger