A backdoor in xz

What you *want* to achieve, is for the person paying to want to pay the minimum possible, but for them to have two (at least) different ways of minimising the cost.

My preferred example is with things like insurance companies. Why shouldn't the police have a "burglary investigation department" paid for by the insurance companies? You then hopefully get a "steady state" where the police catch enough burglars to keep the crime rate down, but barring outright fraud the system isn't going to get out of hand.

Unfortunately, capitalism tends to sabotage such neat systems, another example is the mess we have of utilities - it makes sense for the infrastructure to be owned by the customers, but all too often it's treated as a profit centre by suppliers :-( As a result you get the horror stories we of from America of people locked into cable monopolies, or stuck with dial-up speeds. In a first world state !?!?

(I won't say we're much better - in theory we're a lot better off, but it still fails horribly ...)

Cheers,
Wol