Notes - Burdens of Proof - page 209

sense that one did not do geometry or analysis—by taking as given what is presented
by idealized common-sense. That tells you what a straight line is by accepting what
is generally agreed and refining it into a definition. From the feeling that every
rational person can recognize a straight line when they see one, the old argument
moved to a belief that all such people share the concept, which if need be, can be
articulated. The modernist argument preferred to define straight lines only as part
of a system of definition for, as it might be, plane or higher-dimensional geometry,
and it did this not by telling you what a straight line is, but by telling you what
you could say about it. Whatever met the definition was a straight line, even if they
might look very strange. There was no attempt to show that the new, implicit, defi-
nitions somehow captured the essence of the real object, because the real object was
only incidentally what it was about.” Jeremy Gray, “Modern Mathematics as a Cul-
tural Phenomenon,” in The Architecture of Modern Mathematics , ed. José Ferreirós and
Jeremy Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 390.

75. Goldreich, “On the Foundations of Modern Cryptography,” 4; emphasis
added.

76. Giovanni Di Crescenzo, “Foundations of Modern Cryptography,” in Contempo-
rary Cryptology , ed. Dario Catalano et al. (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2005), 89. In a
beautifully ironic twist, Goldreich argues that handwritten signatures in fact fail to
meet their own requirements, as modeled by cryptographers: “We note that the
formulation of digital signatures also provides a clear statement of the essential
ingredients of handwritten signatures. The ingredients are each person's ability to
sign for him/herself, a universally agreed-upon verification procedure, and the belief
(or assertion) that it is infeasible (or at least hard) to forge signatures in a manner
that passes the verification procedure. It is not clear to what extent handwritten
signatures do meet these requirements. In contrast, our treatment of digital-signa-
ture schemes provide precise statements concerning the extent to which digital
signatures meet these requirements.” Oded Goldreich, Foundations of Cryptography:
Basic Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 498.

77. Agre, Computation and Human Experience , 302.

5 Written Proof

1. The Minitel was an enormously successful videotex online service launched by
France Telecom in 1980. It is still accessible and in use (http://www.minitel.fr); see
Jack Kessler, “Networked Information in France, 1993: The Internet's Future,” Inter-
net Research 4, no. 1 (1994): 18-30.

2. Easterbrook, “Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,” 208.

3. Ibid., 208.

4. Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace , 89.