Orkut Comparison With PGP "Web of Trust"

[agfoust]

There's a very interesting Google Groups (Usenet) post by Erik Aronesty (erik@zoneedit.com) comparing the Orkut social network to the PGP "Web of Trust".

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm...ing.google.com

One important security and privacy point made in the post is:

Ultimately, a great Web of Trust user interface could look something
like Orkut, except it would be hosted locally and would be a P2P
application. Thus it would not require any centralized authority,
such as Google, to maintain.

It's a bit ominous to imagine that the centralized friend association information might be misused one day to link you to someone suspected of terrorism even if indirectly. I'm convinced this could become an issue for honest citizens sooner or later.

[intelliot]

A peer-to-peer social networking application... that's a new idea.

[Anonymous]

One thing i didn't understand,
What is the "PGP Web of Trust" ?

[agfoust]

One can google the phrase "PGP Web of Trust" to find out the details of the concept. Here's a short summary clipped from:

http://www.medicineau.net.au/computi...tornmoney.html

One solution to the problem (of key management) is to introduce the notion of "trusted parties", that is, people who you trust to introduce (and therefore authenticate) other parties to you. Using the telephone analogy, you would only say secret things on the phone if someone you trust had given you the telephone number, not if you had just looked it up in the phone book. This is what the PGP documentation refers to as the "Web of Trust". Its structure is likened to that of a web as each party involved, trusted by you, can introduce other parties whom you may or may not already know.

A good reference:

The PGP Trust Model
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/F.Abdu.../pgptrust.html

[tjoyce]

That's a WEIRD comparison. Not gonna comment more right now. Just sounds weird, judging from your post. Is it something I really want to know?

[cvrk3]

all community sites are based on trust. while the possibility of the trust being misued exists, we also have to take into account, that the netizens are still child and would like to experiment more awaiting the orders to be in place.

[3fingeredPete]

I found that rather interesting, even though I don't understand the concept of the Web of Trust.

It is an interesting dilemma that we can't tell who is a robot and who isn't.

Maybe I could be a robot.

Or maybe not.