Re: Why did the PGP Web of Trust fail?

> On 20 Jun 2018, at 21:30, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2018-06-20 at 21:11 +0200, Henry Story wrote:
> 
>> 
>> https://medium.com/@bblfish/what-are-the-failings-of-pgp-web-of-trust
>> -958e1f62e5b7
>> 
> 
> Thanks for sharing that here!
> 
> i don't know that pgp failed - that is, whether it achieved the
> original goals of its designers. Neither do i think not being supported
> in MacMail is likely to be relevant, since Apple has a small market
> share in the world.  However, you're right that it's hard to use. In
> particular it requires vastly more effort for most people than any
> perceived benefit, and that's i think its real adoption limit.
> 
> If i receive an email message, most of the time i know who it is; if
> not, it's probably spam unless they introduce themselves as a prince in
> Nigeria or something :)
> 
> Verifiable Credentials are solving a different problem, much more
> widely applicable. People _are_ willing to go to more trouble to
> identify themselves in order to get a driving license or download a
> college coursebook that's required reading or rent an apartment. When
> it comes down to logging in to a forum or to buying a pair of socks, if
> there's somewhere easier they may go elsewhere.

yes, that's kind of the point of the reasoning in the post. 
It looks like you you stopped at the first part, where Tim Berners
Lee was musing on what the causes of the lack of success of PGP 
could be. 

A bit further down I show some limitations in the PGP claims format.
For example they only allow 256 different attributes ,
as those attributes are numbered with one byte.

That is the point at which I consider the Verifiable Claims work as say
an improved PGP. But then one gets to the point of the skills required to
verify a claim, which is what leads to the instutitonal trust.

The institutional Web of Trust is developed in the last part of this longer
post "From Digital Sovereignty to the Web of Nations"
https://medium.com/cybersoton/from-digital-sovereignty-to-the-web-of-nations-61fbc28d79cd

You'll see there in the comments by Philip Sheldrake who asked how that ties
into the Verifiable Claims. When you look at my answer there you should
see how the whole thing fits together :-)

> 
> Liam
> 
> 
> -- 
> Liam Quin, W3C,  http://www.fromoldbooks.org/
> 
> Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/
> XSLT/XQuery/Web/Text Processing work and consulting.

Received on Wednesday, 20 June 2018 19:40:36 UTC