At 01:06 PM 10/18/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
At 12:31 PM -0400 10/18/00, David Honig wrote:
I suggest Reputation Hijacking, but don't expect the lexicon to change.
And I think all of these examples/phrases miss the essential point. ... Alice does not own her reputation. Alice does not own her identity. Alice does not own the trust others have in her various credentials. ... Crypto and related tools offer Alice and others the means to make such casual "thefts" (aspersions, etc.) harder to do. Alice can digitally sign to "prove" mathematically she is the holder of certain credentials. And so on, for the obvious extensions to webs of trust, webs of doubt, webs of gossip, etc.
Any talk of "theft" or "misappropriation" misses this key point.
Good point. Perhaps 'fraud by impersonation' is better. ...
"Where do I go to get my reputation back?" Think about it.
I suppose a chick with a sullied reputation has to go to a different social clique where they haven't heard of her, won't recognize her, and don't communicate with the clique that implements the first reputation. You'll note I've phrased it so that the reputation is *distributed* amongst the former clique, which I think is your point: reputation (and the polymoderators thereof) is a private, nongovernmental matter. If you want to believe the council of rabbis or the better business bureau or the FTC its your choice. Of course, the maligned chick should have been using crypto to protect herself. Still, I'm aware of no protocol that will prevent malicious collaborators from claiming wrong things about her, e.g., if they restrict their libel to her and otherwise maintain trustworthy. PK sigs don't help. ALSO, infosec is a *system* property, and you may have to trust others that you don't control. E.G., your (nominally private and typically authenticating) SSID was leaked to the public; this could be used to harass you. Similarly with digitized fingerprints that the DMV owns a copy of, etc. Which reminds me that you can't change those; meatspace 'identity' has a problem in that fingers will be used as authenticators, so meat-identity can't be as... parallel... as fully informational identities, like nyms. Anyway, I don't think I ever claimed I "owned" my reputation (in the sense of being able to get the govt to coerce you to act that way). But I am bound to (I was going to write, "own") my 'responsibility to creditors', abuse of which by forging my meatspace-id is fraud, which the govt is reasonable in using violence to prevent. I suspect that you regard such impersonation-fraud as theft, as I do. I suspect we also both regard any violence-based (ie, govt) rules wrt linking meat to bits as unconstitional limits on freedom of speech. Both points need to be communicated to Joe Sixpack, Joeseph Merlot, and Johannes Bourbon III. dh