On 25 Sep 2012, at 18:12, Ben Laurie <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 25 September 2012 17:06, Henry Story <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On 25 Sep 2012, at 17:45, Ben Laurie <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 25 September 2012 16:07, Henry Story <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On 25 Sep 2012, at 16:45, Stephen Kent <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Henry,
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> WebID is not in the charter for this WG. If you want to discuss S/MIME 
>>>>>>> and WebID, you are free to do so elsewhere, of course. There is no need 
>>>>>>> for you to Cc this WG on that work.
>>>>>> Neither I suppose is TLS, or MIME btw, or many other standards that are 
>>>>>> discussed on this list. But knowing that they exist has always been 
>>>>>> important to IETF practice. It's called: not re-inventing the wheel. But 
>>>>>> I see you have a problem with that. Sorry to have hurt your feelings.
>>>>> If you were to read the DANE charter 
>>>>> (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dane/charter/)
>>>>> you would see that TLS is cited 5 times, so your supposition above is 
>>>>> wrong with regard to
>>>>> its first assertion.
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks. But not MIME - So the point holds well enough :-)
>>>> 
>>>> Anyway, the webid spec
>>>> 
>>>>   http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/
>>>> 
>>>> also is very clearly tied to TLS, and would benefit a lot from DANE being 
>>>> deployed. So my interest in DANE is not a side issue. The strongest 
>>>> pushback against WebID ( and so using client certificates ) is the cost of 
>>>> server certificates for most players.
>>> 
>>> You mean people who aren't using HTTPS to secure logins care about WebID?
>> 
>> People who are not using HTTPS to secure logins won't have very secure 
>> logins (even passwords require protection). I am speaking about pushback 
>> from people who are serious about security (not counting the TOR type super 
>> security folks - but I will show that WebID works there too).
>> 
>>> 
>>>> ( the next strongest is the inability to logout from all but Firefox 
>>>> browsers )
>>> 
>>> Am I really the only one who cares about usability?
>> 
>> Firefox usability (of client certs) sucks. All the others are pretty good, 
>> and could easily be made better by a little work from the browser vendors. I 
>> demonstrate that very clearly in the video on http://webid.info/ . Now why 
>> browser vendors like Firefox don't do the few weeks work to get useability 
>> working is beyond me. I think it is partly because they don't understand how 
>> useable they could make client certificates with WebID.
> 
> Sigh. Why do I have to go over this every time?

I really don't know. I keep answering your questions precisely. Perhaps you are 
asking them rhetorically to help me the difficult bits to new audiences? :-)

> Usability in the
> browser is only part of the problem, the rest are things like moving
> between machines, dealing with revocation, migrating existing accounts
> and so on.


But that is exactly what WebID makes simple:
  - moving between machines: 
     + create different certificates on each machine ( use a one time passwords 
to log in if you want high security)
      here is a video that shows this: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4dlMTZhUDc
    ( + use crypto keys if you wanted to be seriously secure )
  - dealing with revocation is easy: remove the public key from the WebID 
profile
   you can see how easy it is to do this on this live server 
https://my-profile.eu/
   (that's a one click event)
  - migrating existing accounts: you have HTTP redirects for that
 
I think the reason people never consider 1. is that they keep thinking of 
certificates as things you use to log into only one web site. So of course if 
that is what it were for, then having a certificate to login AND a password 
would be weird. But our position is the opposite: the purpose of a certificate 
is to login to any web site you wish to - usually not your home server.

Ok, so now someone is going to barge in and say this is off topic, probably 
just in time to avoid you having to answer the above points :-)
   But I hope those who are open to new ideas will see that there is something 
odd in how there is a simple working solution to a serious problem that is 
making the headlines every week, and how slow it is to get these ideas to move 
along - even amongst IETF members who have everything to gain from this working 
out.

   Henry

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

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