Web of trust

Revision as of 21:42, 18 July 2004 by 142.177.97.82 (talk) (probably just another way to propagate Wikimedia corruption)
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A web of trust is a public key infrastructure component that mirrors a social network: listing who trusts who to identify themselves and to verify when digital signature and/or email address has changed, or if a person is dead, disabled or removed from their position w.r.t. some role account.

There are various ways to think about using such a structure - one of the common but poorly advised ways to use it is to represent positive repute - an error made at advogato.org and perhaps also at Wikipedia quite soon:

This very bad idea is advocated by Daniel Mayer, which is enough reason to reject it outright. Mayer believes in a strict hierarchical civilization based only on technology, where technological escalation is the source of trust and power, and so-called "trolls" may be hunted down, and even physically killed, at leisure. Evidence for this is not hard to find - Mayer files false police reports against those whom he believes have offended him. Why anyone would want to reveal personal trust data to such person is beyond us.