> Well, should we be adding people from seeing their blogs? That is > precisely how LiveJournal works, but it is dangerous from a darknet > perspective...
How do you build up trust in the real world? Reading someone's blog might give you some idea of whether they're trustworthy - chatrooms and message boards would be even better. Different users will have different security requirements - you don't have to add anyone on the basis of their blog, but I'm not sure it's a bad idea to offer the possibility as long as users are aware of the tradeoffs. > Yeah, we should allow introductions, but we should put some careful > warnings in... Definitely. Being able to visualise the web of trust ought to help. > Not a good idea IMHO. Allow users to introduce a specific friend to a > specific friend. I think it might be useful to have a middle ground between invisibility and explicit introductions. The default should be invisibility, but making two friends visible to one another would allow them to size one another up without making an immediate decision. Otherwise you just have a name and "er hi... Bob said I should talk to you". > No. We should not encourage people to expose their friends to their > friends, except by way of specific introductions. OK, it's up to you. > I don't get it. Bob could have made up a new node with a new key. We > have to do some sort of out of band verification... if only by asking > people to confirm introductions out of band. Let's say Bob introduces you to someone called Carol. Then you discover that your friend Dave also has a friend called Carol, with exactly the same interests and blog postings as the Carol you know, but a different IP address and public key. Something's wrong - either Bob or Carol or Dave is lying. The node can detect this automatically, prevent you from talking to Carol until you've verified her key out of band, and then tell you which of Bob and Dave gave you the correct key. (Unfortunately this doesn't prove that the other is a spy because Carol could be giving out inconsistent information, but it certainly gives you grounds for suspicion.) Cheers, Michael
