Re: WebID security picture

On 4/8/11 10:33 AM, Mo McRoberts wrote:
> On 8 Apr 2011, at 15:28, Henry Story wrote:
>
>>> How does my grandmother decide which hosts she 'trusts'?
>> How does you grandmother decide which doctor she trusts
> she uses the one which is closest. somebody else has already decided whether they're suitable to be a doctor or not. in fact, she can't use one which is further away unless she decides to pay for private treatment (a minority do, of course), because the doctor's surgery caters to a specific geographical area.
>
>> which computer she should buy
> judging by the sales of awful computers… a lot of people just pick whatever's cheapest.
>
>> which man she married?
> by meeting him first and getting to know him before committing anything…
>
>> How does your grandma decide which chainsaw to use?
> it doesn't matter, because picking the wrong chainsaw has minimal implications, which is how choosing a host for a FOAF document *should* be.

Yes, but once you make your partially informed decision, you have the 
right to choose better options. Sadly, we learn via pain. Ignorance 
isn't bliss, and it might take the wonderment of the InterWeb to fix 
this contemporary human bug.

In a nutshell, I am saying: via initiatives such as WebID the InterWeb 
will accelerate the materialization of pain associated with superficial 
decisions. There's a major difference between "Simply Simple" and 
"Deceptively Simple". Today, the world is primarily intoxicated with 
"Simply Simple" via the deadly misdirection incumbent in the subliminal 
"Ignorance is bliss" meme and mantra pushed by vendors, especially in 
the InterWeb technology realm.

Humans learn via pain, sad but true. WebID will ultimately delivered 
solutions that actually fail in real life. Remember the days when 
signatures on the back of a credit card actually meant something? Today, 
most credit cards have empty signature strips. Remember when your 
signature on a checque (or check) meant something? Ditto the socially 
awkward situation re. false negatives on said signatures etc.. WebID 
will take us back to meaningful signatures module social awkwardness of 
verification.

Re. flaws and vulnerabilities. As we do interop and QA, lets encourage 
people to break our systems if they can. Takeover my WebID by breaking 
into my Data Space :-)


Kingsley
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-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Friday, 8 April 2011 15:55:43 UTC