Boastfully ignorant reporters [Was: Zergo can do secure TTPs]

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, John Young wrote:

> Well, yes, indeed, it's a bind for those of us who never seem
> to get it right about crypto, gaga to help, and must learn to
> bear the darts heaved our way when we cannot get it just so
> as the superwizards do amongst themselves.

I don't think that anyone is asking journalists to get the math right.
But it's like trying to teach people to use PGP or the like.  Some
of the concepts take work.  When we get proper systems that do everything
right, the users won't need to understand those concepts, but we are not
there yet.  Journalists do need to make the effort to understand some
of the concepts.  In many cases they actually do, but still boast of
ignorance as a hook to the audience.
 
> Still, the wizards out of their ether aren't any better, god bless
> their valiant attempts to Postscript equations and algorithms
> and sheets upon sheets of alphnumerics into everyday
> plaintext fools like me can grasp in ASCII text, or best, buy as
> Microsoft sweets.

Way off topic, but you can get a pair of programs (ghostscript and
ghostview) which will display and print PostScript for just about
any computer platform around.

-j
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Jeffrey Goldberg                +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
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 J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk     http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice.