At 5:02 PM -0500 on 10/26/98, Vin McLellan wrote:
(Or maybe, more to the point, we've been working in different dimensions.)
Right. Exactly. Attacking flatland from the third dimension has always been my special curse. :-). <Excellent visit to X.BlaBla Wonderland elided...> I hope if I can be excused if I don't want to chase you down that particular rabbit-hole anymore, Vin. Sorry to disappoint, but there are *lots* of other, more qualified people around to walk through *that* particular looking glass, to mix my metaphors like a doormouse. I'm interested in *lots* of other stuff besides the traceability of "on-line" audit trails and mapping meatspace book-entry transaction processing to the internet like so much financial shovelware. I will, however say, once again, that you can have reputation in cypherspace without any biometric "identity" whatsoever, modulo the footprints we all leave when we do stuff anyway. I wrote a rather extended rant about this a while ago, in November or so last year, and everyone on these lists has seen it. (Some, unfortunately, more than once. :-).) Let me know if you want to send it to you under separate cover, and, if memory serves, it may even be on the old Shipwright site, <http://www.shipwright.com>. Anyway, if you'd like to talk to someone who'll take up the cudgel, you might want to talk to folks like Carl Ellison and Perry Metzger, who just did an entire session at the USENIX electronic commerce conference on just this kind of stuff. They're much more, um, curioser and curioser about key/identity orthogonality than I am. :-). I just assume what they more or less prove, to my own satisfaction. I think I've said all I care to on the subject. And watch out for the little blue mushrooms. The visuals last for days... Cheers, Bob Hettinga PS: I would note, by way of a plug, that the DCSB meeting next Tuesday will probably be a *great* place to talk about this, as Dan Geer from CertCo (speaking of the USENIX electronic commerce conference) will certainly be talking about this kind of thing -- and other such fun stuff. ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'