Re: Email Web of Trust

Yakov Shafranovich <[email protected]> wrote:
>> [ simple "link" web of trust has issues ]
>
> Then the real question becomes, what class of spam and what 
> aspects/types of spam problems does this "web of trust" idea solve?

  It gives recipients more information.  It allows recipients to "ask
around" about a "new guy", and get a recommendation "good/bad/ugly".

  This web of trust is no different than that used in job interviews.
Sure, someone's resume may look wonderful, and they may come across as
competent, but if the web of trust says "after 3 months, he shows up
at work drunk", you probably don't want to hire him.

  The sole purpose of the web of trust is to make better decisions
earlier in time.  You could accept gigabytes of crap from an MTA you
haven't heard of before, or you could be told "that MTA will send you
gigabytes of crap".  You would probably then decide to not talk to it.

  It doesn't stop the spam problem.  It reduces the local cost of
dealing with the spam problem.  Look at it as leveraging the CPU time
and $$ of everyone else, to make your decisions.

  You could buy 10 machines to do content filtering, or you could
distribute that work among 10 friends, and then have everybody
exchange results.  This is similar in concept to distributed systems
like DCC, except that the results will be emperical, simple, and not
political.  The results will hopefully be much simpler to publish, and
won't require much in the way of new software.

  Also, because the web of trust can be designed to have confidence
values on the links, it doesn't have the problem that you have to
either trust someone elses input absolutely, or you don't trust it at
all.  Systems with binary trust values just don't work in the long run.

  Alan DeKok.