Trustworthy contacts

[George Foot]

September 10th. 2000

Dear Brian,

YES;  Your wording is better and more precise than mine.

My main point however is that trust cannot be the product of a
"machine"  no matter how complex that is -- and  a machine tends
to be elaborated further as time proceeds especially if is shown to
be failing.

Trust essentially requires "humans" somewhere in the chain and
of course a number of mechanisms for that purpose already exist
in commercial life.   

All this has been said before but is not appreciated sufficiently by
people who seek a machine solution and encumber E-commerce
with new ideas which have superficial gloss but are flawed.

George





George





in message <001e01c01b00$e9cead80$87299fd4@fortytwo>, Brian
Gladman <brg@gladman.plus.com> writes
>From: "George Foot" <georgefoot@oxted.demon.co.uk>
>To: "ukcrypto" <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk>
>Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2000 11:12 AM
>Subject: Trustworthy contacts
>
>
>> A cryptosystem common to a  number of nations is impractical unless
>> those nations are fully integrated politically and have a discipline
>> which allows a full investigation by any one of them into lapses which
>> occur in any  other of them  --- a state of intimate political union for
>> which there is no prospect at the present time ?
>
>Not so since a number of nations already use shared cryptosystems.  Major
>nations deploy a large number of different cryptosystems and what will not
>happen is that a nation will protect its critical national information
>assets with a cryptosystem that it also shares with other nations.
>
>My suspicion is that this is closer to what George means (I am sure he will
>correct me if I am wrong!).
>
>       Brian
>
>
>

-- 
George Foot
georgefoot@oxted.demon.co.uk
http://www.oxted.demon.co.uk/
http://www.oxted.demon.co.uk/index.html