Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/urn/urn-archives/urn-ietf.archive.9611/000033_owner-urn-ietf _Tue Nov 5 07:26:48 1996.msg

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From: Fisher Mark <[e-mail]>
To: Bob Briscoe <[e-mail]>,
        "[e-mail]" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: [URN] Persistence as part of URN framework
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 96 07:26:00 EST
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Reply-To: Fisher Mark <[e-mail]>
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>Persistence is a contractual
>thing which needs a technical hook to hang the contract on.

But there are no technical hooks to guarantee persistence.  On the
cypherpunks list a few months ago, there was a discussion of what it would
take to encrypt a message now, save it away for 100 years, then let the
recipient decrypt the message.  The conclusion I drew from that discussion
was that this was a hard problem without a technical solution short of
deploying on every desktop and in every data center a persistent OS that
stored copies of all persistent data.  Even then, the data would only
persist as long as technical means remained to read the persistent data.
 (How many of us could read a 600 bpi 9-track tape or punched card deck even
if we had to?)

The important point about URNs is that there is an extra level of
indirection built into the resolution process, such that the URN -> URL ->
resource resolution (in the N2L case) can transparently (at the user agent
level) change the URL(s) associated with that URN, without changing the URN.
 Kind of a superpowered 30x redirect, in a way.  This technical detail (the
extra level of indirection) is what will give URNs additional capability to
persist.
======================================================================
Mark Leighton Fisher                   Thomson Consumer Electronics
[e-mail]                   Indianapolis, IN