Failure of PKI in messaging

[Peter Saint-Andre]

Leichter, Jerry wrote:

> On the other hand, the push/pull combination of spam and IM/SMS are well
> on their way to killing Internet mail.  

Video killed the radio star? I'm an IM partisan, but even I have given 
up on trying to kill off email.

> Meanwhile, the next generation of users is growing up on the immediacy
> of IM and text messaging.  Mail is ... so 20th century.

I prefer the phrase "second-millennium". :-)

> I think the whole notion of decentralizing *everything* has turned out
> to be a trap.  

Interestingly, the public communication systems that are "secure" 
(Hushmail, Skype, etc.) are all centralized. I can't claim that a 
decentralized approach like Jabber is secure, though we're working on it...

> Trust has
> *always* been based on personal contact, extended to organizations that
> work hard to have a "human face" on the one hand, and to various
> human-scale, humanly-transparent ways of reifying and rendering portable
> the smile and the handshake, from letters of credit to various business
> rating organizations (D&B, BBB), and so on.  Replacing that with some
> abstract cryptographic system that no one understands, no one can see or
> touch - and that ultimately can only be perceived as trustworthy if it
> comes from trustworthy institutions anyway - is just a non-starter.

Can't agree more. (Not that agreement is the sine qua non of discussion.)

> With this shaky base, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that
> after all these years of trying, we haven't managed to come up with
> human interfaces to these systems that actually allow them to work
> effectively in the human world.

So how do we abstract from or extend what (somewhat) works in the real 
world to something that might work in the online world?

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
XMPP Standards Foundation
http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/people/stpeter.shtml

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