Humour me.
I'm trying to work up some ideas, and I'm looking for feedback,
either more ideas or references to 'things I should look at'.
I'm taking my starting point the following: the pros and
cons of widespread personal authentication on the internet.
With widespread authentication, it might be possible to reduce spam.
Recipients might refuse email from non-authenticated senders.
There are other social benefits to authentication. Multiplayer
games suffer when cheats exploit hard to close loopholes
(http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20000724/pritchard_01.htm and
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/25/1448226)
When we are responsible for our actions (our guilt and our
glory have a half life beyond a few hours) then we might
take more care to act in a more long term manner.
(What penalties could be meted out? Banishment?)
Imagine not a single yes / no authentication but a multi layered,
'rings of authentication', something like what we use for social
validation at the moment.
The PGP keyring signing suggests not signing someone else's key
unless they are physically verified.
But what if we could have levels of verification. I know Jack,
and Jack knows Judy, therefore I'll verify Judy as a suitable
person to play backgammon with. A sort of 'rings of association'.
Level 1 :- physically verified, through to level 3 :- friend
of a friend.
But there could also be more formal methods. A bank could verify
that Joe Bloggs is a valued customer of good standing.
How would such a system work? There are public pgp key servers
http://www.pgp.net/pgpnet/pks-commands.html.
(How would an email recipient program use such public servers?
I'm envisaging a system something like dns, where you
could publically verify the sender, up to some level of trust).
I was imagining something like ldap.
How would it be funded? Subscription? Perhaps each ISP could
run one as part of their service?
Thanks in advance for any ideas you can add.
Jamie
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