Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: vision: purposeful online community for all human beings

Author:Dennis Peterson
Posted:7/10/2000; 3:00:32 PM
Topic:vision: purposeful online community for all human beings...
Msg #:18450 (In response to 18448)
Prev/Next:18449 / 18451

I'm not convinced that distributed trust is all that hard for people to understand. We just need the right metaphor--it's not a driver's license, it's your circle of friends, introducing each other. In any case, public key servers should be able to verify email addresses fairly well--submit a key/email, the server sends you an email with a large random integer encrypted with the key you sent, and you increment the integer by one and send a response back. Something like that. If this process were automated, and the key retrieval were automated as you suggest, and we called it an "envelope" instead of encryption, it would be fairly transparent.

You should be able to look under the covers whenever you want, to make sure it's working right. Also, there should be an option to encrypt the private key with a secure passphrase--people are used to passwords, so that shouldn't be a big jump.

I think another reason people don't accept encryption is not that they think it's insecure, but that they've heard a lot of propaganda about how it's scary terrorist technology, and they feel it's paranoid overkill to use it. A little button that says "enable envelopes and signatures" could go a long way.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:55:37 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.