trusting public keys

[Trevor Smith]

On September 19, 2004 1:02 am, Jeff Lee wrote:
> Would it be a safe bet for me to go ahead and mark people that I recieve
> email from on this list as trusted with gnupg?  I realize that I shouldn't

It seems to me that this is the only sensible way to act. Since few of us will 
ever meet, the *only* persona that we will ever want to verify is the one we 
see on this list. So if a person self-identifies with a gpg key, then that 
can be that person's signature from then on and that's all we really need to 
know, isn't it? (That we're speaking to the same person 2 weeks from now that 
we were speaking to today.)

Of course, no one should relate any real-world identity to an unverified 
electronic identity, just because someone generates a gpg key, but I doubt 
anyone is foolish enough to do that.

-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com