Re: bozoproofing the net, was The Value of Reputation

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>]

--On søndag, januar 01, 2006 22:53:15 -0500 John R Levine <johnl at iecc.com> 
wrote:

> Or consider S/MIME.  S/MIME applications have a cert list similar to the
> one in a web browser, so they also have the problem of dividing the world
> into haves who can afford a cert with a signature from someone in the list
> and have-nots who can't.  I haven't read every word of every S/MIME RFC
> (there sure are a lot of them), but if there's any warnings about
> balkanization, they're very well hidden.

I think you are making John's point.......

There's a pair of facts (or what passes for facts) here:

- the IETF community has rejected the idea of mandating a single root for 
"just about anything" (except for the DNS, the IANA and the address spaces)
- Multiple roots lead to balkanization (of lesser or greater severity)

If these statements are both true, they might explain the lack of success 
of S/MIME as a tool for general (rather than balkanized) communication.

As far as I remember, neither of these statements have come out as 
consensus statements in any IETF document - perhaps because "everyone" 
knows that raising the issue will cause an endless debate and no consensus 
document?

Might be time to challenge that assumption....

                      Harald


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