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Technology Stocks : WAVX Anyone? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Marty Lee who wrote (2462)	5/29/1998 1:58:00 PM
From: Paul Schmidt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11417

I agree - whats the diffs? Nobody resents having their water, eletricity or telephone metered. Actually I like the fact that my transactions are moved one step away from the bank, who also happens to be the agent I apply to for credit, and who then sits with all my spending habits and god knows what else in their hands, when they make their decisions. The fact is that the Wavemeter meters what it is told to meter by the website or CDROM that it interacts with. It would also be told what the cost per unit metered should be, and then it simply gets on with it. The wavemeter is not concerned what content those bits carry that flash past, nor where it had come from whether the local peep shop or the planet Zog. The company selling you content/goods may know that Wavemeter 1003923 had just connected to their network and had ordered yet another cowboy vid to be piped across, and another company may know that Wavemeter 1003923 has a foot fetish. But that is a long way from identifiying the person to whom that wavemeter belongs, and certainly much more difficult for any one institution to put together a profile of spending habits, which then invariably find its way into direct sellers databases. Wave Systems Corp may or may not maintain a database that actually identifies an individual as the owner of a specific wavemeter. There may be advantages (security) to the customer in being identified with a specific wavemeter, and there could be disadvantages (privacy) but these are hardly issues that are likely to be set in stone, and probably easily altered by a company sensitive to the public opinion. Maintaining a database of wavemeter users could be an expensive exercise when a 100 million wavemeters are out there. Most likely Wave Systems Corp would want to maintain the minimum data possible to ensure 1) A real sale had occurred - to rule out virtual fraud. 2) to identify which company had been bought from - to distribute the spoils, and 3) how many units were metered for that company - again doesn'tneed to give any info regarding the content of the sale. Wave would not necessarily need to know the identity of the person behind the wavemeter it is interacting with. Sorry this is so longwinded, but I am trying to argue through the issues raised, and am hoping that by discussing a scenario like this we can work it out. I'm sure it is not correct in all assumptions, but could anyone with technical or other knowledge comment on mistaken beliefs. The point is I think it can actually be more anonymous than current systems. Great smoke! Paul PS. Anyway, why should these be issues to knock Wave with if companies like Verisign owe their very existence (and damn good stock price too!) to the concept of positively tying down an identity to a particular computer.