RE: A plea against central planning (was: Why not import everything?)

> suspect we need to use some thing like Epinions version of the Web of
> Trust to duplicate the peer review process found in the scientific
> community.

Thawte (a Verisign competitor) has a Web of Trust program:
http://www.thawte.com/getinfo/programs/wot/contents.html

Still identity-based, though.

I think that techniques for determining general trustworthiness of
assertions will depend on the situation.  For example, assertions about
whether a payment has been submitted would probably rely on a digital
signature from an explicitly trusted authority.  On the other hand,
trustworthiness of assertions on less critical matters could be done
with web-of-trust as in epinions or advogato.

Another easy way to get a crude measure of trustworthiness of assertions
is to do basket analysis on a large group of assertions, and "trust" the
people who fall into your same basket.  In other words, people who say
similar things to you are probably going to be agreeable to you :-) 

Received on Friday, 24 May 2002 15:38:09 UTC