(This really should be in private mail; keyid D072FC19 (still unnamed) can reach me using anon.penet.fi or alpha.c2.org or a reply-block remailer to get replies.... Or if you prefer, send me one-way remail and I'll post replies in alt.anonymous.messages.) At 02:17 AM 11/19/95 -0800, - keyid D072FC19 (still unnamed) wrote:

On Sat, 18 Nov 1995, Bill Stewart wrote:

...

Here's the new entity's key, signed :-) I haven't added it to the PGP key servers; I'll leave that up to you...

As we know, a public key certificate is a binding between the key and some attribute, as asserted by the signer. In this case you have asserted a binding between my key and the string "a new entity, as yet unnamed". I don't understand why you did this. Would you please explain? The only reason I can think of is that you wanted to provide evidence for the key's creation date by timestamping it. If that was the case, I thank you. But in the future, to avoid confusion, perhaps you can create a new ID "timestamp" for the key and sign that instead.

Are you asking why I used the string "a new entity, as yet unnamed", or why I certified it? If the former, it's because when I loaded the PGP key block into my public key file, that's who it said it was, and it matched the name in your cypherpunks posting. If you're asking why I certified a key used by a nym, I started doing that a couple months ago, as an experiment about what it means to certify keys and how to provide better continuity for keys used by nyms, and signing yours seemed like an appropriate thing to do (since you chose to name your key as belonging to the same string you signed your message with.) I have the policy of only signing one key for a given namestring with the key I use for signing nyms, so it gives a certain evidence of uniqueness as well as the timestamping effect. Since you also commented on cluttering up namespace, I didn't send the key to the keyserver myself; that's up to you. Has it been a wildly successful experiment? Well, no :-) But I've at least had to think about some of the issues more, and a couple of people have gotten their nym keys signed. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281