RE: petname implementation recommendation proposal

Hi Tim,

There's no need for the names to be clever, or inventive in any way. It's fine, in fact preferable, to just use whatever name comes to mind when you think of the named entity. I think this style of naming is a surprisingly scalable solution for the human mind. If you tried to enumerate all the different people, companies, or entities of any kind, that you know of, and what name you use to refer to them, you'ld be surprised at how many more than 20 you come up with. Sometimes, we mentally attach little qualifiers to the names, like "Mark from the gym" as opposed to "Mark from work", but I think we generally manage to keep all the different entities we interact with separate and distinct in our minds, and I think we do that with petnames. The display software I am proposing is just a convenience for safely hooking up those petnames to their corresponding Internet identifiers.

--Tyler

________________________________
From: public-wsc-wg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-wsc-wg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Timothy Hahn
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 11:05 AM
To: public-wsc-wg@w3.org
Subject: RE: petname implementation recommendation proposal


Tyler,

I have to agree with you that it seems like it would be much easier for people to remember something they chose rather than something that was chosen for them and written in a "language" (if you could call it that) which only weird folks like us sometimes understand.

Where I keep struggling with this though is in the reliance on the user to choose a mnemonic.  Looking at it from the point of view of a non-technical person (or so I believe):  Should they choose one that is unique for each site they visit?  After 20 or so mnemonics, they would probably run out of clever names.  They would probably start re-using names.  Is there any harm in this?  Or could they use the same mnemonic for everything?  (after all, this would be easy for them to remember).  What is the potential harm in doing so?

I am sure that you have some good answers to these questions.  Hopefully the rest of the list will find the answers as useful as I will.

Regards,
Tim Hahn
IBM Distinguished Engineer

Internet: hahnt@us.ibm.com
Internal: Timothy Hahn/Durham/IBM@IBMUS
phone: 919.224.1565     tie-line: 8/687.1565
fax: 919.224.2530



From:   "Close, Tyler J." <tyler.close@hp.com>
To:     Rachna Dhamija <rachna.w3c@gmail.com>, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
Cc:     Thomas Roessler <tlr@w3.org>, Mary Ellen Zurko/Westford/IBM@Iris, "public-wsc-wg@w3.org" <public-wsc-wg@w3.org>
Date:   03/19/2008 11:58 AM
Subject:        RE: petname implementation recommendation proposal

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Rachna Dhamija wrote:
> By what measure?

I think if we make any reasonable effort to quantify the user effort involved in correctly distinguishing a known site from an imposter using the hostname display versus the petname display, we will find an advantage for the petname display.

On each repeated visit:

For the hostname display, the user must remember the exact hostname used by the known site and perform an exact character-for-character match against the string presented by the hostname display.

For the petname display, the user must check that the petname display is enabled and displaying a petname that looks like one they would have assigned to the known site. If the petname looks more or less right, it is exactly right.

On initial visit:

For the hostname display, the user must study the hostname display and commit to memory the exact string being displayed.

For the petname display, the user must type in a short mnemonic of their own choosing.

For multi-hostname sites:

For the hostname display, no indication is provided that a newly encountered hostname has any relationship with a previously known one.

For the petname display, when the site's certificate creates a binding between hostnames, the petname assigned to the previously encountered hostname is displayed.

What's hard:

I believe the following are hard tasks for users:
       - exactly remembering a string chosen by someone else
       - correctly performing a character-for-character match of a presented string against a remembered string
       - correctly searching for information that is not presented

I believe the following are feasible tasks for users:
       - approximately recognizing a presented string as one chosen in the past

Conclusion:

The petname display substitutes feasible user skills where the hostname display requires infeasible ones.

Again, I'm not saying the petname tool is perfect as is, but it's better and moving in the right direction and I think I know what the next steps are.

--Tyler