Acidus wrote:
] A great way to protect all types of transactions. The Credit
] Card companies refuse to adopt it because it anonymizes people
] and their transactions, and thus they would no longer be able
] to sell the data.
]
] Hashing is your friend

I need to vent.

This sounds interesting, however I can't open the documents. The HTML protocol description isn't that helpful for getting the big picture, and the word documents crash my copy of MS's OSX Word. MS's formats are not cross platform, even using their own products on both platforms. I have the same problem with some WMA using OSX Windows Media Player. All this MS crap simply DOES NOT WORK.

Are PDFs that hard to make? Seriously. There is a place for non-editable formats, they remove complexity and platform dependent issues that causes problems. A few weeks ago, I had someone talking my ear off with shit about how Postscript is evil. News flash! Postscript works, there is a place for it, this is it. At least I can read the document on every platform, and have it display properly without having all the same fonts installed as the person who authored it. I'm not saying that editable formats shouldn't be distributed also, that's asinine. However, something I can display on all platforms would very helpful in situations like these.

Update: This is similar in some ways to the problem posed by source only licenses. You can lay the argument on me all day about how having (and knowing how to build from) the source empowers the user, but its just a flawed argument. The user is concerned with the app working, and that's it. The developer is who you need to empower. As long as the only thing that differentiates a user and a developer is a decision and another download, its all good.

Rattle wrote:
] I need to vent.
]
] This sounds interesting, however I can't open the documents.
] The HTML protocol description isn't that helpful for getting
] the big picture, and the word documents crash my copy of MS's
] OSX Word. MS's formats are not cross platform, even using
] their own products on both platforms. I have the same problem
] with some WMA using OSX Windows Media Player. All this MS
] crap simply DOES NOT WORK.
]
] Are PDFs that hard to make? Seriously.

This document was pubished in 1997, and it was in development for several years before that. This was the period of time when PostScript was really still the domain of academia and didn't work consistently everywhere, and Adobe was starting to push PDF but it was a proprietary format and didn't work consistently everywhere. While I agree that today it would be ridiculous to put out a word document, this thing is from the mid-nineties. In 1996 you used word for things like this. It was the lesser of the evils.

MS probably didn't QA the version of word you're running against a document this old. They probably don't have a test case for "legacy" word docs on Macs. They probably should. This example might, in fact, get their attention, as this is a rather famous document.

Acidus wrote:
] A great way to protect all types of transactions. The Credit
] Card companies refuse to adopt it because it anonymizes people
] and their transactions, and thus they would no longer be able
] to sell the data.
]
] Hashing is your friend

SET was developed by Visa. My take is that its a little over engineered. It provides purchaser anonymnity, but not merchant anonymnity, with the primary advantage from the credit card company's standpoint being that merchants cannot commit fraud.

Amex has a much much simpler approach. You can input your credit card number into their website, and they will give you another number which is good for one transaction. You can use it with a merchant and buy stuff, and after the one transaction that number is useless and the merchant has no way of correlating data about you.

Visa has run several experiments with this kind of technology. I absolutely loved the visa-cash system they deployed in Atlanta around the time of the olympics. But people didn't get it. Americans have a pitifully slow technology adoption rate. So visa-cash went away. There wasn't enough interest to sustain it. Visa has a smart card credit card. If you want to see more technology like this in your credit card you have to demonstrate demand. Get a high tech Visa, or Amex card, and use it.