"One way or another, we're in for a privacy/identity arms race. Managing cert revocation in any practical way will be a huge challenge, for sure. It might also be a huge business opportunity" [Jon Udell].

Trust on the Internet must be managed in a way that allows the user to stay in control. There have been several ideas proposed that would allow trust ratings to be meted out in a collaborative way [here][here]. But, all technical mumbo-jumbo aside, it comes down to a simple proposition. Those who are trusted by many can probably be trusted.

You might call it the Google principle of trust. Google ranks a site based on the number of other sites that link to it. The more sites that link to a given site, the more pertinent that site is considered to be and thus the higher PageRank it receives. In a collaborative trust system, the more people that trust you, the more trustworthy you are assumed to be. This type of system allows the end user to decide who she wishes to trust without forcing her to explicitly enumerate every trustworthy individual.

Plus, trust can be transitive. Christopher trusts Andrea who trusts Jen, therefore Christopher can assume that Jen is also trustworthy. This is how trust works in the real world and there is no reason the model can't be explicitly implemented in an Internet environment. The real challenge is getting a critical mass of participants in a trust certification network.
12:54:41 PM    

"According to a whitepaper found on 'a fairly insecure server', UNIX not only is more reliable and easier to maintain than Windows (2000 in this case), it's cheaper too. These shock results are reported on both The Register and (the source) Security Office" [Slashdot].

It is such a guilty pleasure to see dishonest behavior revealed in such a manner. Nothing in this article is new, per se, it is simply the fact that it came from Microsoft's own lips which makes it interesting.
11:59:58 AM    

In a move the can only be characterized as an egregious afront to the 1st Amendment, the DMCA has been used to silence posts made to a public forum that mentioned prices being charged at various retail outlets [ArsTechnica].

A day after the U.S. Copyright Office began accepting public comments on the "anticircumvention" section of the DMCA, another situation has developed suggesting the entire Act needs reworking. Several retail outlets are wielding DMCA suit threats, forcing FatWallet.com (and other sites) to take down forum postings on Nov. 29th sale information. Even though FatWallet believes the information posted on their site was not protected by the DMCA, the info was taken down as a sensible business decision.

This act has been used over and over by big business to attack the little guy. It's high time that this act was thrown out.
11:41:58 AM