On Thursday 20 January 2005 2:47 pm, Chris Gianelloni wrote: > Remember that PGP is about verifying the identity of the person, not of > their work.
PGP is about verifying that Person A is the same Person A you think it is. The name and email values only provide hints to other people on possible ways to verify this. Keys are a pointer to a person that are verified with signatures. Names are simply different pointers with very unconfirmable means of verification. Do I care if some guy has a driver's license saying his name is "Chris Gianelloni"? No... I only care that he is the same person I have known as 'wolf31o2' up until this point. > The government does some half-way decent checking into who you > are, by requiring certain paperwork, for you to get identification. > That makes the government a decent choice in a place to put faith into > their identification papers. The same can be said for schools (public > or private, so not necessarily government) or places of employment. Isn't it fun how you need IdA to get IdB, IdC, or IdD, but you need at least IdD and IdC to get IdA? The US government, at least, has a total mess in their identification system. On Thursday 20 January 2005 3:09 pm, Chris Gianelloni wrote: > On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 21:33 -0800, Brian Beattie wrote: > > My mistake, I think I fixed it a little in my follow up, but my main > > point, is that for many purposes, my REAL name is > > [EMAIL PROTECTED], not Brian Beattie, because that the the true, > > unique identifier (their are other Brian Beatties living I am sure). > > No. For all purposes your real name is Brian Beattie. You might use > [EMAIL PROTECTED] as an identifier, but it is not your name. It > is an email address. Just like a social security number may be an > identifier, it is not you, nor your name. Your email is an identifier. Your SS# is an identifier. Likewise, your *name* is just yet another identifier. -- Luke-Jr Developer, Utopios http://utopios.org/ -- [email protected] mailing list
