signing a robot's key - was: Re: Global Directory signatures

[Atom 'Smasher']

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On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, David Shaw wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 01:50:24PM -0600, Kyle Hasselbacher wrote:
>
>> In some cases, a user might have wanted to use it as a trusted 
>> introducer.  To assign owner trust, it has to be valid.  To be valid, 
>> they have to sign it.  Perhaps some of them knew that this is better 
>> done with a local signature and fat fingered the signing, but it's a 
>> little hard to believe someone understood the web of trust well enough 
>> to want to sign but not well enough to know a local sig was better.
>
> Oh, I can believe that.  It's the "I need to sign this to make things 
> work" thing.  Do beginners necessarily understand what signing entails? 
> No.  Do they necessarily understand what the web of trust even is?  No. 
> All they know is that the instructions say to sign the key, so they sign 
> the key.
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is that the behavior of PGP(tm)? i once helped someone use PGP(tm) and in 
the 30-60 seconds that i was using it, it seemed to require a signature 
before it would recognize an imported key... i helped the user to make a 
non-exportable signature, but i don't recall that being the default.


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  762A 3B98 A3C3 96C9 C6B7 582A B88D 52E4 D9F5 7808
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Comment: http://atom.smasher.org/links/#digital_signatures

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