An attack on paypal

[Anne & Lynn Wheeler]

>You need a Better Business Bureau's cert,  where the BBB is financially
>liable.
>(This implies it checks in *meatspace* and probably implies competition too.)

we actually included that in suggestion as part of original stuff for 
setting up electronic commerce and providing comfort to consumers. however 
it didn't take the form of a certificate .... which is left over from 
ancient offline world (aka certificates are akin to the little BBB 
certificates that you get to put in your window ... a comfort issue but 
doesn't actually address any real cases). even before e-commerce, the real 
BBB process was that people called up the BBB and got realtime information 
.... i.e. it was an online, realtime process.

the equiivalent for an online, internet paradigm (as opposed to something 
left over from the offline email genre of at least 10--15 years earlier) 
was that the browswer tab;e pf trusted entities were of online authorities 
(as opposed to certificate manufacturing) and if you cared, you clicked 
thru to the BBB and got realtime information about the merchant in question 
(being equivalent to when people call the BBB to actually get some level of 
real input .... as opposed to just a fuzzy comfort fealing).

lots of past posts about merchant comfort certificates and ancient efforts 
to suggest requiring a BBB operation for internet merchants:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcert


--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler    http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/
Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm
  


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