When you happen to have a hammer...
I've been working off and on since the start of vacation on an XSLT implementation of hashcash, an anti-spam "stamping" tool that relies on creating partial SHA-1 hash collisions as proof-of-work tokens. Hashcash is intended for email; the XSLT version is for weblog comments. A legitimate poster can wait a few extra seconds for a comment to post; a spammer relies on being able to post lots of stuff quickly, so hashcash breaks their model.
Earlier today, I was reading my email via a webmail client on a computer that wasn't mine, and received a PGP-encrypted message with a vaguely ominous subject line from a friend who was out of town. I was in a position where I wouldn't be able to get to one of my own machines for a while, nor was I able to install anything on the box I had available. I usually keep a copy of my PGP key on my thumbdrive/MP3 player, and I suppose I could also load up a minimal PGP installation (I know of at least one that fits on a floppy, so putting it on a thumbdrive is No Big Deal), but it sure would be nice to be able to plug an encrypted email into a form which turns the raw ASCII into XML, then decrypts said text client-side.
The world doesn't need an XSLT implementation of PGP, but the world might get one anyway.
Earlier today, I was reading my email via a webmail client on a computer that wasn't mine, and received a PGP-encrypted message with a vaguely ominous subject line from a friend who was out of town. I was in a position where I wouldn't be able to get to one of my own machines for a while, nor was I able to install anything on the box I had available. I usually keep a copy of my PGP key on my thumbdrive/MP3 player, and I suppose I could also load up a minimal PGP installation (I know of at least one that fits on a floppy, so putting it on a thumbdrive is No Big Deal), but it sure would be nice to be able to plug an encrypted email into a form which turns the raw ASCII into XML, then decrypts said text client-side.
The world doesn't need an XSLT implementation of PGP, but the world might get one anyway.
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