Subject: Re: [Iotops] can we create protocols that securely transfer ownership?

From: William_J_G Overington <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 10:55:27 +0000 (GMT)

Michael Richardson wrote:
> Tales of dystopian machine dominated futures abound.
Here is a link to a eutopian science fiction novel that I wrote from 
June 2016 to February 2019.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/novel.htm
It is free to read, no registration required.
The novel is intended to support an invention of mine for communication 
through the language barrier in some circumstances. The invention was 
originally intended for person to person communication using plain text 
and also for use on web pages yet could also be used for human to thing 
communication and for thing to human communication through the language 
barrier using plain text. Maybe also for thing to thing communication 
too as my intention is for the invention to be open source for maximum 
use and interoperability.
The science in the novel is real, there is a real research project, for 
which there are various documents, including a slide show.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_research.htm

A second novel is a work in progress.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locse_novel2.htm

I am wondering if the issue of being able to recover the original 
software for a thing could be solved by some infrastructure something 
like it being good practice for the manufacturer of the thing to produce 
a hexadecimal dump of the software and publish it in a PDF (Portable 
Document Format) document and for that PDF document to be deposited at 
The British Library in accordance with the legal deposit regulations 
together with a note permitting The British Library to supply a copy to 
anyone for a fee. The document could also be made available on the 
manufacturer's website, yet legal deposit at The British Library would 
mean that the document would still be available even if the manufacturer 
went out of business and the website was no longer available.

That would apply to publications published in the United Kingdom.

National libraries in other countries may have similar systems.

Given that hexadecimal dump maybe that could be used to reset the thing 
to its original configuration.

I put this forward as an idea for discussion in the hope that a useful 
infrastructure will be developed.

https://www.bl.uk/legal-deposit

I have previously sent various pure electronic  items to The British 
Library for legal deposit and these have been accepted and an email 
receipt sent to me.

As well as PDF documents I have sent images and fonts that I have 
produced and published.

William Overington

Saturday 31 October 2020