On Fri, 6 Oct 1995, Mike McNally wrote:
hfinney@shell.portal.com writes:
m5@dev.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) writes:
hfinney@shell.portal.com writes:
There is a difference between a MITM and the case you describe ...
Seems to me that the idea of "communicating with the person you think you are" is intractably difficult if you're not sitting in the same room. ...
I can certainly agree with the attractive simplicity of this notion. My point is that it is practically useless. ...
Oddly enough, it seems to me that Hal (if that really *is* his name) and I (and Carl & others) are saying basically the same things, but drawing completely different conclusions. Strange. I'm willing to wait to see what the peer review process concludes.
I think Hal and some other Cypherpunks (Me, You, Carl, etc.) are not proceeding from one of the same assumptions. Specifically, Hal seems to be proceeding from the assumption that the person "on the other end of the line" is in fact a known physical entity who has a meat reputation tied to the name. I'm proceeding from the assumption that the person on the other end of the line has no specific RL reputation that I'm basing the relationship on, just the online one. Here's an example: There's someone on the list, now, apparently, with the name of "Steven Levy." Hal assumes that, when communicating with that "Steven Levy," one intends to communicate with the fairly-well-known journalist of that name, and thus certification of RL identity is important. I assume that, unless there's a specific reason otherwise, I want to have an intellectual conversation (or financial transaction, etc) that isn't predicated on this being "the" Steven Levy. In that case, certification of RL identity is irrelevant. (Not to pick on you, Steve, but I needed an obvious example familiar to list members... The other candidate was Steve Wozniak, to whom I sent fan e-mail the other day... :) ) Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon Lasser <jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu> (410)494-3072 Visit my home page at http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/ You have a friend at the NSA: Big Brother is watching. Finger for PGP key.