On Sun, 9 Jun 1996 ichudov@algebra.com wrote: Fascinating stuff about polite gun-owners deleted.
If we think about anonymous computer contractors and anonymous employers, the interesting question is how to maintain reputations and how to check references.
I think it comes down to "who watches the watchers". Do you trust Business Week's ratings of so and so management consultant? Do you trust The Cypherpunk Guide To Business Magazines's ratings of Business Week's ratings of consultants? How about Joe Usenet's assessment of the above on misc.stocks.slander? This begins to resemble the problem of the pgp Web of Trust. This problem already exists in the non-anonymous flesh-and-paper world. Who do you trust to tell you who to trust (and so on)? Do you trust journalists who take ad money? Presumably, once a decent profit model evolves for net publishing, there will be some incentive for customers to give you their opinions, and for others to gather them. Do you have a clear path of trust (or faith or some other quality) proceeding either to them or to their stated customers? I forsee many variations of trust webs to determine the quality of ratings. Eg. I am 50% in agreement with Hal's taste in ice cream, 10% in agreement with Declan's and 75% with the Economist's. I have signed this with my key. Do the math to see how much you trust my assessment of Tim Horton's chocolate pecan fudge. You decide how to do the math. Tim and Hal had some really nice articles on this last month ---Begin PGC Comment--- KeyID 0xF00 C1: Payment-Statement: I have not been payed to make the above endorsement. C2: Coercion-Statement: I have not been coerced into making the above statement ---Begin PGC Signature--- 13235097u13251-9233u5v123rsdf;lkhjs -882351932u4v ---End PGc Signature--- Pretty Good Commentary is a copyrighted trademark of KeyID 0xF00 ---End PGC Comment--- Reminds me that I should grab an AI book real soon now. Another thing one could use is a pseudonymous open-booking protocol (I didn't read Eric's post, so I don't know if it's any good) to determine if alleged customers are the real article. Offhand, I'd venture a guess that we'd see the above problem again, which hints at the importance of a good generalized trust or agreement calculus (and calculator) for formalized comments. I don't want to imagine how bad the traffic will get on IETF mailing lists to standardize trust comments.