How trust works in gpg...

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Dear David.


On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 16:41 -0400, David Shaw wrote:
> It is irrelevant to this.  There are a lot of "David Shaw"s in the
> world, and it's pointless to try and prevent collisions in a set that
> large.  The disambiguation in OpenPGP keys is really the email
> address, not the name.
Hm in my opinion this depends on how the User ID packet type is
interpreted (I'll try discuss that on the WG list in some days).
If it is actually only an ID in the sense to clearly differentiate all
keys I think the name is actually irrelevant, as names always have
collisions.
But in that case the User ID packet type should be change (of course
this is heavily incompatible) to only contain an unique identifier like
an email adress, perhaps even DNS names, or UUIDs.
And the Name should be moved to a user attribute package.

You see what I mean? I consider the ID (which is by the meaning of the
word just something to differentiate objects) as a different class of
information than user attributes (like his name, birthday, birthplace,
or his picture).


Ok now back to the beginning: When the name in the UID would be just a
cosmetic addition to the actual ID (the e-mail address) I'd say it's
irrelevant if it's complete.

But if it's interpreted as Name + e-mail of a person, I think one should
only certify the whole name.
With a certification a signator says <name> is the keyholders name,
but in my case my name is neither "Christoph Mitterer", nor "christoph
mitterer", nor "Chris Mitterer" it is (even from a legal point of view
"Christoph Anton Mitterer".

See my point? I consider missing information as grave as wrong
information.
Each signature on a file or email would not validate if I simply remove
something from the mail.

Best wishes,
-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Christoph Anton Mitterer

eMail:
christoph.anton.mitterer at physik.uni-muenchen.de
mail at christoph.anton.mitterer.name

Jabber/XMPP:
chat at christoph.anton.mitterer.name

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Lehrstuhl für experimentelle Physik – Elementarteilchenphysik
Sektion Physik
Am Coulombwall 1
85748 Garching bei München
Germany