Re: [pkng] Some more wacky ideas... Usability ?

[Massimiliano Pala <[e-mail]>]

Hello Peter,

I understand what you say.. maybe we see things from two very different
point of view. To me, if you trust already your buddy-list is because you
already have some sort of relationship with someone. That is a viable
approach for humans. It has two problems though. First, it does not scale
outside the number of people you interact with, even more when it comes to
extend the trust over the internet.. particularly in this case, I think it
would be better to provide the user with the possibility to extend the
trust from few, well known authorities (we usually do not interact with
that many, directly) in some easy fashion, instead of applying a peer-to-peer
policy. My point being, we need some kind of authority...

Second, when you try to extend the concept to devices (phones, cars, house
appliances, etc..) well.. the buddy list is something we do not really have..
so the user-centric model, like PGP, is would not really work without heavy
user interaction... and not on the Internet, IMHO.

This said, it could be interesting analyzing what can be done when the
two models are combined in a sort of bi-dimensional space...

My sqrt(4) cents...

Cheers,
Max


On 11/13/2009 12:41 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Forgive me for being an IM guy, but when it comes to personal trust
> online, for many people the buddy list is the center of the universe. I
> like the idea of person to person trust because it could be represented
> or instantiated in the buddy list, and that would feel natural to a lot
> of people. The idea of the buddy list could be extended to application
> servers, CAs, and other such entities (in fact we have been exploring
> that in the Jabber community for incident reporting between servers).
>
> Peter
>


-- 

Best Regards,

	Massimiliano Pala

--o------------------------------------------------------------------------
Massimiliano Pala [OpenCA Project Manager]                   [e-mail]
                                                  [e-mail]

Dartmouth Computer Science Dept               Home Phone: [phone]
PKI/Trust Laboratory                          Work Phone: [phone]
--o------------------------------------------------------------------------
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us
who do.
							   -- Isaac Asimov