As it turns out, there are some privacy implications to “commodity data”, though, and not just the ones where the RIAA (or the US government) is suddenly very interested in what particular “commodity data” you share with their database of copyrighted works or terrorist reading matter.

For one thing, if I’m understanding the issue correctly, you can effectively do the equivalent of dictionary attacks on particular file variants. So, for instance, lots of people store root MySQL passwords in effectively the same format in a file called .my.cnf. You generate a huge load of .my.cnfs with a dictionary of commonly used passwords, and then find out who has that file (or is asking for it).

You can read: https://zooko.com/convergent_encryption_reconsidered.html for the gory details, and some ways to mitigate.

I read the RFCs and my eyes glaze over before getting anywhere. “It is very important to note that it is impossible to read and understand a single document in that series without reading the related documents.” Indeed.

I imagine there are still thousands of still personal shell aliases out there still enabled that grep for the netscape pid in ps output and “kill -HUP” it.

I still have some .pfr files kicking around on my personal server from experimenting with this stuff ten years ago. I seem to recall it crashing Netscape 4 pretty hard on the SGI Indys at Uni. But then again, a stiff breeze caused Netscape 4 to crash…