Re: World Wide Web of Trust

On 21 Dec 2011, at 11:49, Mo McRoberts wrote:

> 
> On 20 Dec 2011, at 16:50, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> 
>> On 20 December 2011 08:26, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:
>>> Some time ago we were criticised for taking on the word "Web of Trust" which is confusing as it has been taken
>>> up by GPG people. I suggest that when this issue comes up we can now distinguish our version's full name as
>>> being a World Wide Web of Trust . Something we could use in the spec perhaps .
>> 
>> Pointer to the criticism?  I had always considered WOT to a more
>> generic idea, that could be expanded to the web.

Somewhere on the foaf-protocols list a few years ago. It was something that came up. I thought it was a 
point you made, but really I can't remember that clearly. 

> 
> WoT is definitely generic, though PGP popularised it. Thawte also used WoT for its X.509-based 'community' notarisation initiative; I’m sure there have been others.

I agree that Wot is generic, that is why I kept using the term. But at the same time it does lead people
to make an association with a technology that has not succeeded as much as hoped. So I think we could when
needed make the point with the notion of WWWOT :-)

> 
>> 
>> I do like the term "World Wide Web of Trust".   WWWOT?
>> 
>> I also wonder, Is a GPG key an IFP?  Is it a URN?

A key is not an IFP. An IFP is an Inverse Functional Property. So you mean: is it the object of an IFP.
An the answer is there it is probably the object of an infinite number of IFPs.

Is it a URN. Obviously it is not a URN. Could it be made one? yes, but it would be very very long URN, that
could break a lot of URI tools.

> 
> No reason why you couldn't express a key (either by full fingerprint, or the truncated fingerprint that PGP uses as a key ID, or the whole key itself) as a URN. I don't think anybody's specced it to date, but it wouldn't be especially difficult once you've settled on what exactly would constitute the 'name'.
> 
> (Note also that that an RSA or DSA key used to create/encapsulated within a WebID certificate can also be expressed as a PGP key...)
> 
> M.
> 
> -- 
> Mo McRoberts - Technical Lead - The Space,
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Received on Wednesday, 21 December 2011 11:02:21 UTC