why must gnupg user-id "real names" be at least 5 characters long?

[David Shaw]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 08:56:31AM +0100, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-02-10 at 03:08, David Shaw wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 12:19:08AM +0000, tav wrote:
> 
> > > also, this leads onto the question of what the user-id is used for?
> > > could someone give me a brief summary please? (apologies for not reading
> > > the openpgp spec to find out. the 70 odd pages is a bit much for me.)
> > 
> > It is used to identify the owner of the key.  When someone signs your
> > key, they are actually signing the user ID plus the key data.
> 
> ... and there may be some gpg users who would refuse signing userids not
> containing a full real name. (Yes, I occasionally sign userids
> containing only the email address, but I generally don't like userids
> containing only a pseudonym or a short name.)

Neither do I.  There are many difficulties with userids like that, not
the least of which is "So, show me a photo ID that says you are Bart
Simpson..."

David

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   David Shaw  |  dshaw@jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
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