Re: Global PKI on DNS?

[Einar Stefferud <stef at nma.com>]

None of this, whether the dollar was stolen or not, has any impact on 
the trustworthiness of the original dollar, as it is a bearer note, 
and a dollar stolen is a dollar earned in some quarters.

Just like car manufacturers consider a car stolen to be a car sold, 
unless it was stolen from the manufacturer.

We trust the intrinsic appearance of the dollar bill.

Or the pink slip for car ownership, but do not trust the car without 
its pink slip.

Now, if I give you a check, and you give my check, made out to you, 
endorsed to someone else, the recipient, if she accepts it is relying 
on the transitivity of trust, whether such reliance is reliably 
transitive or not.  Most people in the US will not accept such 
checks, but in some countries, such checks circulate for a long time 
and some are never cashed.

The real underlying issue here is reliance, and as Ed has pointed 
out, reliance depends on more than the bearer saying "Trust Me!" 
which is a single channel of communication.  In the case of a dollar, 
it depends on the perceived ability to find a greater fool to accept 
it at face value,
as in the act of buying or selling common stock shares.

This is why "Trust Me!" is generally considered a joke and why most 
people laugh at it, whether they understand the formal logic of the 
humor or not.

But it is clear that trust is not some simple property of objects!
It is much more complex and depends on subjective evaluations of its
value, gennerally incorporating many bits of information from 
multiple channels.

Cheers...\Stef


At 5:50 PM -0400 6/18/02, Stephen Kent wrote:
> At 11:03 AM -0500 6/18/02, Alex Audu wrote:
> > Ed,
> >
> > You made some interesting points which leads me to wonder if
> > we can define Trust in such a way that its parameters are verifiable,
> > then we can verify that it is transitive. In other words, if Jon gets
> > a dollar from Mike, and Jon can verify the parameters of the dollar,
> > then Jon doesn't care about the "trustworthyness" of  Mike's source.
> > Or should he?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Alex.
>
> I didn't want to comment on this example, but your message forces me to do so.
>
> Jon verifies the dollar, which is a bearer credential, and not Mike, 
> the person from whom he received the dollar. (The dollar could have 
> been stolen by Mike!) This example says nothing about transitivity 
> of trust.
>
> Steve