[13858] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive

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Re: Announcing httpsy://, a YURL scheme

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (sayke)
Tue Jul 15 23:05:26 2003

X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 14:32:05 -0700
To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: sayke <sayke@gmx.net>
In-Reply-To: <87znjgx6wo.fsf@snark.piermont.com>

At 09:21 AM 7/15/2003 -0400, someone with the password to 
perry@piermont.com wrote:

>SFS makes it practically impossible to do key updates, and the trust
>model is rather flawed -- if you mount files from one site you in
>practice end up trusting it totally, which means that it can hand you
>links to spoofed other sites and you'll in practice totally believe
>them unless you're paying very close attention and have the ability to
>perfectly recognize long hashes by eye. It is a neat idea, and
>certainly instructive, but I don't know that I particularly love it.

         i think the difference between sfs and yurl lies in the yurl 
scheme's use of pet names to make long hashes easier to remember. while 
this seems like a promising approach, the thought of typing in a new pet 
name every time i visit a new domain (or mount a new volume via nfs) looks 
like too high of a burden, interface-wise, on users in general.
         perhaps if i could occasionally download (and authenticate with a 
[pet_name, hash] pair) pre-digested lists of such pairs from opennic or the 
eff etc, i might feel more inclined to use the system... this opens the 
possibility of multiple coexisting global namespaces, and raises ye olde' 
"who do you trust" question...
         perhaps we might as well design things that use [global_name, 
ip_address, pubkey_fingerprint, pet_name] sets, and just get it over with =D

sayke, v3.0
/*
"Do not imagine that Art is something designed to give gentle uplift and 
self-confidence. Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English 
sense. But do not forget that brassiere is French for life-jacket." -- 
Julian Barnes, Floubert's Parrot (1984)
*/


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