On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 12:40:33PM -0400, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
So, from the receiver's point of view, there are a number of
entities out there, each with a set of assertions about
senders. First, a receiver trusts the people it has paid to
trust: reputation services who objectively report past
performance about senders and perhaps offer a prediction
about their future behaviour. Second, a receiver may also
trust anyone it considers a good source of data: and
an accreditation service happens to be reputable, then it
gets included in the decisionmaking process. But that
doesn't make an accreditation service a reputation service.
An accreditation service may be an input to decisionmaking,
but it is still subject to a prior decision of what its
reputation is worth.
I think we'll always differ on the point of whether one can successfully
sell reputation data and retain one's own reputation in the community,
but that's neither here nor there at the moment. You mention reputation
services reporting objectively on a sender's past performance: I don't
believe they do, or are capable of doing so.
Reputation services report their opinion of past performance. That
opinion may (and, IMO, should be) well-defined and open to anyone, but
it's still their opinion. E.g., a MAPS entry is not an objective act.
Instead, it's an act representing the MAPS organization's opinion of
that sender's past behavior. Those who subscribe to MAPS do so because
they supposedly agree with how MAPS forms their opinions about senders.
This is why I think Karma is an excellent idea (for those who aren't
Meng: I know I railed against Karma earlier, but I had a fundamental
misunderstanding of Karma, which Meng was kind and patient enough to
help me see through): Karma would attempt to provide a meta-opinion of
the various reputation services. In effect, it would judge the methods
by which various reputation systems arrive at their opinions based on an
efffctiveness metric. Ultimately, even Karma is still providing an
opinion, and that opinion still to a great extent reflects that of those
who subscribe to the Karma service. However, it would allow for some
interesting comparisons among reputation service approaches that should
be of value to the community it serves, particularly since the
comparison would bridge various disparate communities and bring to bear
a more generic opinion of spam/ham (in other words, Karma would have a
larger sample size from which to draw data).
--
Mark C. Langston GOSSiP Project Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark(_at_)bitshift(_dot_)org http://sufficiently-advanced.net
mark(_at_)seti(_dot_)org
Systems & Network Admin Distributed SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org E-mail Reputation http://www.seti.org