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▲ jcranmer 4 hours ago

Web-of-trust doesn't work. Even before the PGP web-of-trust broke down several years ago, analyses of how the web-of-trust actually ended up working out showed that it basically boils back down to CAs: people rely on a few highly central keys to do most of the signing rather than signing keys themselves, and these keys effectively function like CAs.

The broader issue is that users don't want to (and probably don't have the ability to) actually make any trust decisions; they much prefer to delegate all of the decisions on trustworthiness to somebody else. The PKI root CA system does have its flaws, but on the whole, I suspect that people like Mozilla are better stewards as to whether or not the person vouching for somebody else is trustworthy than the average or even the above-average user.

▲__MatrixMan__ 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Web of trust has been working between humans for over a million years. If we've failed to make computers do it, it's probably just for lack of trying.

To your second point, that might be true in a world where the consequences of making a bad trust decision was some kind of hassle related to changing passwords or reporting your cards stolen. But we seem to be moving towards a world where it lands you in a detention facility or some other dire consequence. I think that sooner or later, users are going to realize that they want that control and will be willing to do the corresponding trust hygiene work. Besides, isn't making that kind of work easy the point of technology? We just need to do better re: making it usable rather than investing in systems we know to be unsafe.

▲eqvinox 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Humans are generally considered to have been around for only ca. 300'000 years.

Also, the interpersonal web of trust is IMHO quite clearly failing in the age of mass media, and not just recently.

▲__MatrixMan__ an hour ago | parent [-]

Sure, but what do we do from here? Attempt to augment it with technology so that it starts scaling again, or give up and replace it with something centralized?