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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Signing keys
paulproteus (United States) · Jun 18th, 2007 3:24 am · 13 votes · no comments made
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On Saturday evening after the keynote talk, Tomi announced that a PGP key signing would be occurring downstairs from where it was. He said, If you know what it is, you're invited, and if you don't, you're invited so you can learn what it is.
My interest in PGP comes from Free Software enthusiasts who use signatures to stand by the software they publish.
PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy." An American named Phil Zimmerman created it in the early 1990s to allow him to encrypt communication to his peers so that eavesdroppers could not read it as well as let users sign files in an unforgeable way. Back then, US law prevented him from giving it to other countries because computer files including encryption software was classified as "munitions". Zimmerman began exporting the software on paper in response.
Key signing answers a question that technology cannot solve: Once you have some long number that you find on the Web, how do you know for sure it represents a particular person? To solve this, users of the PGP network have built a "web of trust" - if Alice can validate a key for Bob is really his, and Bob has done the same for Charlie, then Alice has a trust path to Charlie.
So what we did after the talk was show each other identification and trade public key fingerprints, numbers that identify us on the PGP network. Unlike new networks based on commercial web sites, this network does not rely on anything central - there is a distributed network of "key servers", and all they do is store the files; those files are also stored on users' computers and can be uploaded anywhere else instead.
In a network like this, we too have the popularity contest game: Who has the most signatures? How few hops is it to any given celebrity? You can look people up on the PGP key pathfinder; you'll see that our attendee Benjamin Mako Hill ranks in the top ten most-connected people!
tags: dubrovnik croatia culture pgp gpg free-software summit07
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