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Re: Why are we here? What are our goals?

2004-01-30 21:17:06


On Jan 30, 2004, at 9:48 AM, Paul Crowley wrote:

I'd be interested to know if you've looked at modern attack resistant
trust metrics in detail before saying that.  Metrics like Advogato,
PageRank, and my own TrustFlow are explicitly designed to resist
attackers who try to artifically inflate their trust through mass
identity creation.


At a simple level, yes. In detail, no. But I don't believe that web-of-trust or social-networking metrics are the way a server should define its trust model. perhaps as a service an admin can choose to interface to, but I think those issues are outside of the scope of what we should be doing here, other than making allowances for them to be interfaced to the system if an admin chooses to. So let us focus on building core features and a way to plug these things in, let's not try to build them in, especially in areas (like security) that are still under active investigation and advancement where we don't know what techniques we ultimately want to use (or where, I think, we'll find different groups will want to use different techniques that serve different needs). This is one of those places where I think "thinking globally" is a bad idea -- there is no "one true way", so let's focus on a way to interface to "many different pretty good ways" and not hardcode things into the standard/RFC/protocol that don't need to be. Emphasis is extendability and flexibility, not necessarily features...