Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu> writes:
Eric> There has been a huge conflagration on the pem-dev list Eric> lately concerning naming issues, X.500, etc. I am Eric> somewhat disturbed by what I see as a fundamental Eric> mentality of PEM: the desire to lift intact all existing Eric> political, economic, and social relationships into the Eric> electronic domain. That doesn't surprise me in the least. There's a paradigm shift going on in the networking community, but it's difficult to tell which way it's going to land. The US, in have a very open, almost anarchic protocol development process based highly in meritocracy, built the core of the Internet while everyone else in the world was working to start passing 128-byte X.25 packets, and trying to decide how much to charge per packet. The unfortunate reality is that the same people overseas have found the "golden goose", and are trying to figure out how to domesticate it. The U.S. Government and the industry marketeers aren't helping, either. I see a growing bureaucratization of the standards process which may well not advance development much. Eric> ...Identities in the electronic world are expected to Eric> map to entities in the real world. I think a lot of this is a combination of the "One lifetime phone number would be great" phenomenon, and a lack of imagination regarding pseudonymity. I think that we should start writing RFCs for any and all applicable technologies and throwing them into the arena. At best, we might get stellar contributions, at worst, we might slow down the juggernaut that is the ISO. Eric> I agree with Tim that we have made good progress. But Eric> we need more than simple remailers. We need people to Eric> use remailers, and we need to make that easy to do. We Eric> need key distribution mechanisms. We need better Eric> meeting spaces than mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups Eric> and private mail. We need markets and contracts. I think that remailer authors should seriously consider spec'ing out their technology and publishing RFC's as soon as possible. The development of on-line markets seems to be one of the best-kept secrets on the Net. I only know of a handful (if that) of companies actively working on such things, but they're not known outside of their own backyards. Laissez faire, ---Strat