Eddy Nigg wrote:
On 11/10/2008 04:31 PM, Ian G:
Eddy Nigg wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] is hardly a legal identity...
That's because there is no such thing as a "legal identity."
I think he meant with "legal" your legally given name as listed in your
passport for example or an organization as registered and authorized to
perform trade in the respective country.
Yes, you are confirming and reinforcing his point: the dominant
paridigm -- to push a concept of a binding of legal name to key -- is
making it difficult for advocates of crypto to gain traction.
One reason (there are many) is that there is no "legal identity" in
existence, so efforts to push it run into invisible barriers. Your
examples don't work, because many courts simply don't care so much about
the name, only about the body: habeus corpus.
The names in passports are not "legally given" as you suggest, they are
just names in passports. E.g., over at CAcert there is a statistic that
something like 1% of passports have errors in them; it is not a
perfectly reliable document. That's because passports are evidence of
citizenship, and the inclusion of a name there is more an attempt to
narrow down frauds on citizenship; passports are not intended for other
purposes, and they are not necessarily an accurate representation of any
name of the person. IOW, the issuer doesn't care.
Also, bear in mind that ones mother is a better authority on names than
the government, generally, and all other things are derivative. And,
different cultures do different things ....
Granted, the name of an organisation registered at the creation
authority is likely a better bet as to the name, but that is only when
the registry is also the creation entity. Even then there are things
like trading names, wholly owned companies, foreign registrations,
multiple rights to the same trading name, etc, which are fine,
"legally," before the court, depending. The court is happy when it has
the right guy, name or not.
You can't even identify an entity uniquely by insisting on an ID number,
as some countries don't issue numbers, and some issue more than one.
Naming is not an exact science. There is no one true name :)
By trying to appear 'legitimate' the authority which you created falls
into the same problems which plague every other authority.
I don't sense the problem really.
Legitimacy is 99% marketing. If the 99% believe you are legit, then you
are. If not, then not.
I don't agree. "Legitimate" in the way I use it usually it means
legitimate from the software vendor point of view. Legitimate may be
also in the point of view of a country and their legal system. It may be
even legitimate in the point of view of the user (as you call it
"marketing"), however in the context we discuss it here usually it's
certainly the browser.
"Legitimate" is what we call a "loaded term". It is used to push a
certain viewpoint without inviting serious analysis, that is, where the
analysis would reveal obvious flaws.
Consider it this way. Say we are deciding whether police are to carry
weapons or not (something that is debated in many countries). We
conduct a survey that asks [1]:
"Do you believe that police should carry guns for legitimate uses?"
The obvious answer is "YES" because of the loaded term. You can't
disagree because the alternate is to say that even for "legitimate"
purposes, police shouldn't carry guns. An alternate reverse-loaded
question would be:
"Do you believe that police should carry guns, even if we know that
99% of our police never need them?"
Just as loaded, and easier to spot.
Any time the word "legitimate" is used, the red flags should go up! It
should be clear from the above that there is no inherent "legitimacy" in
what you describe, and only a hope that we don't question your term.
(If you need to ask what the other 1% is, you're in trouble.)
LOL
iang
[1] this was an actual survey conducted by the NY police.
_______________________________________________
dev-tech-crypto mailing list
dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
