[liberationtech] dark mail alliance

[Jonathan Wilkes]

On 11/02/2013 02:31 AM, phreedom at yandex.ru wrote:
> On Saturday, November 02, 2013 01:22:02 AM Maxim Kammerer wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 12:47 AM, Tony Arcieri <bascule at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> tl;dr: a Bitcoin-like global append-only log can enable the secure mapping
>>> of human-meaningful names to cryptographic keys
>> You are still trusting a third party — a P2P network and the
>> computational effort it represents, in this case — and in addition
>> have a non-trivial monetary cost of entry once the system resembles
>> anything scalable. So you have to both pay money (with all the
>> implications on anonymity and ease of use, among other things) to have
>> a meaningful name, and reduce your address security to one of exploit
>> resistance of some buggy DHT implementation running on nodes you have
>> no control of.
> And you still have problems with phishing thanks to being able to "register" a
> similar domain.
>
> Of course, despite its shortcomings, namecoin is better than the existing
> "global namespaces" which are outright run by hostile entities.
>
> Global namespaces seem to be a solution looking for a problem though. In the
> world full of QR codes and text messaging, sharing your unique ID is not a
> problem, bookmarking/address book handles assigning a memorable name or even
> several descriptive names.

You don't see a difference between a billboard with a fake QR code 
pasted over the real one, and a billboard where the email addy has been 
vandalized to read "@gnail.com?

Until most folks can dissassemble, inspect and reassemble the device 
they own as easily as Gomer Pyle did with his rifle in "Full Metal 
Jacket", I think they need to stick with human readable addresses.

Jonathan