| Weblog: | Where am I? Who am I? Am I? I | |
| Subject: | Personal Certificates | |
| Date: | 2005-12-29 12:44:25 | |
| From: | cpruitt | |
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Response to: Personal Certificates
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Yeah honestly I think I'd rather have my entire hard disk hijacked and deleted than risk the government getting involved with it all. Government involvement inherently means regualtion. Standardization is good, regulation is not.
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Personal Certificates already exist
2005-12-29 20:46:56 JensAlfke [View]
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It already is. You can buy certificates from VeriSign, Thawte and others. It's rather a pain, though — you have to verify your identity to them (otherwise they can't certify it) which means using a notary or something similar. Also, certificates are expensive due to a chicken-and-egg situation, since they're currently mostly used by businesses, not consumers.
The whole business of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is pretty convoluted. I recommend reading Schneier's "Practical Cryptography" for a good overview. It's one of those areas, like AI or the "Semantic Web" that's prone to utopian ideals that collide against messy realities.