Re: Trusted proxy UI strawman

Hahaha, the tone of this email is amazing :) Excuse me while I step back to
get some perspective, internalize different actors in internet trust, and
forget about the quick money angle.


On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 4:31 AM, Nicolas Mailhot <
nicolas.mailhot@laposte.net> wrote:

>
> Le Jeu 19 juin 2014 21:33, William Chan (陈智昌) a écrit :
>
> > That said, I do not agree with your assertion that referencing content
> > from
> > a third party is equivalent to being willing to trust a proxy. I am
> > frankly
> > surprised to hear such a statement. Does anyone else agree with this?
>
> I think you need to step back a little and get some perspective:
>
> 1. first, trust is not a mathematical concept it's a human evaluation of
> the behaviour of other humans (trust does not apply to dead matter or
> automatons, it applies to the people that use them for a particular
> purpose). Since humans are not perfect, trust is fundamentally not
> transitive. You can try to limit the scope of the trust to the maximum to
> limit trust loss during delegation but that's all you can do: limit loss.
>
> That is why any serious security policy will use MAC and not DAC.
>
> That is why despite iron-clad contracts Boeing had to reinternalise
> production to rein in the effects of chain subcontracting (and it was
> *not* a new discovery every decade beancounters manage to convince a big
> organisation that the sanity rules again deep subcontracting can be
> lifted).
>
> That is why even with perfect poll processes, if you let your elected
> representatives elect another layer or representatives and so on it does
> not take many steps before the resulting assembly makes decisions contrary
> to the original electing population (some will say even one level of
> subdelegation is too much).
>
> This is why ponzi schemes are so effective.
>
> Trust is not transitive and the more delegations you accept the less trust
> remains irrespective of technical measures
>
> 2. second, you've still not internalized that on the Internet trust is a
> three-way concept (site, network and user) and you're still evaluating
> trust from the site owner perspective ignoring totally other actors. This
> is why you consider a checksum (!) an appropriate trust safegard when you
> would never admit it as sufficient for other forms of trust.
>
> From a user point of view a clearly identified local operator they can
> easily reach physically and which operates on local laws will often be
> more trustable than a random difficult-to identify site on the other side
> of the world (that, as shown again and again, will decline any obligation
> under local laws when put to trial).
>
> 3. third, cdns and especially js cdns are the ultimate scammer dream:
> they're more anonymous than PO boxes (usually computer-generated ids on
> shared platforms you have to trust as a whole with no way to identify any
> responsible party), they're outside any effective juridiction, they
> execute on the marks' systems with direct access to the marks' info using
> the marks' computing power. (and no one cares: not the delegator – it's no
> on his site, nor the delegatee – it's not his users)
>
> cdns have a long way to go before being remotely trustable from a user
> point of view and they have zero incentive to try especially in a http2
> world where all power is delegated to the calling site.
>
> Frankly, if you forget the quick money angle, a delegating web site is
> about as (or usually less) trusted as a mixed content web site. And if you
> accept to use a site that delegates anything to 666.cloud.com for taxes or
> banking you deserve what you will get.
>
> If browsers were serious about their user interests they would severely
> restrict the number and depth of delegations on any given page, and show
> an untrusted warning any time the delegation complexity went over a very
> low level, instead of trying to enable more delegation.
>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
>
>