John Browne Answers
What are some resources explaining how piracy is (sometimes) good?
Piracy made WordPerfect an industry standard in the 80s. But those days are long past. WP was able to use rampant piracy in lieu of a demo or trial version. Once enough people had grown accustomed to WP inside a business, they would find a need to standardize on it and usually ponied up for the license, if only to get the documentation. Today piracy falls into a couple of camps--non-commercial theft of media like movies and music (as well as software applications) but also serious criminal enterprises who are in business only to sell counterfeit copies to unsuspecting users. This is no different from the fake Rolex watches or rolex daytona
Gucci handbags being sold in the streets of NYC and Beijing. These counterfeits directly compete unfairly with the legitimate IP owner and put that business at a disadvantage.
What is the difference between common encryption algorithms?
For one thing, AES, DES, and Blowfish are all symmetric key algorithms, which means both the encryption and decryption depend on the same key. This makes key exchanges potentially dangerous. RSA and ECC, on the other hand, are asymmetric key algorithms which use public-private key systems, making transmission of encrypted data arguably safer (since the public key distribution can be, well, public).
There has been a persistent rumor that the US Government created a back-door in DES rolex watches
so they could spy on encrypted communications, but no one has ever been able to prove it.
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