Problem with faked-system-time option

Jerome Baum jerome at jeromebaum.com
Wed Jun 15 01:46:03 CEST 2011


>> Not really, without any context. Nobody has to prove anything without
>> that context.
>
> This is also handwaving the bit about how we have extremely effective
> social tools for determining how to handle contested signatures: namely,
> court proceedings.  This isn't a technological problem so much as a social
> one, and modern democracies have developed robust social tools to address
> it.

Err, I have to apologize if I misunderstand, not being a native
speaker, but based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwaving I
understand that you're saying something like this?

"You're ignore the fact that X"

(If you didn't mean to say that, ignore the rest of the email and use
the time to hack on gnupg ;)

That really surprises me because my point really was "X". I was saying
that the context is necessary and that context is a court proceeding
or something "equivalent" (in terms of what's going on, not in terms
of the legally binding nature etc).

We are discussing technological means to prove something formally, but
in court you're usually not proving anything in the logical, formal
sense. You're usually just demonstrating something with sufficient
plausibility. Now, "plausible" is definitely subjective, but to be
subjective there has to be a subject. That subject would be, say, a
judge.

All in all the entire discussion -- besides the technical parts about
timestamp notations etc. -- is huge BS unless there's a lawyer in the
audience. This is not to say that BS can't be fun to talk about.

That was my point. I'm definitely not ignoring the context that the
whole signing technology is inside. Of course, if you never meant to
say that and if I just misunderstood, disregard this email. And shame
on you for reading it and not coding!

-- 
Jerome Baum
tel +49-1578-8434336
email jerome at jeromebaum.com
web www.jeromebaum.com
--
PGP: A0E4 B2D4 94E6 20EE 85BA E45B 63E4 2BD8 C58C 753A
PGP: 2C23 EBFF DF1A 840D 2351 F5F5 F25B A03F 2152 36DA



More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list