UI terminology for calculated validities

Peter Lebbing peter at digitalbrains.com
Sun Apr 27 13:51:42 CEST 2014


On 27/04/14 13:11, Nicolai Josuttis wrote:
> Well, the "users" I asked were just ordinary people in my family
> (typical smart phone users).

Would those be smart users of a phone, or users of a smart phone? Where does the
intelligence reside? ;)

I'm reminded of a nice quote I saw in an e-mail signature.

"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my
wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone"
 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

> Some of these policies would then be supported by GPG directly,
> but I might have to implement one or two in enigmail directly:
> a) This would allow only keys where the user locally signed the key
>    with at least casual checking
>    - Is there an option I can use to have this policy?

It's just b) without assigning trust to any key. I don't think there is a trust
model where you drop all assigned trust, but you can of course empty the trust
database (perhaps back it up, and restore it once the user selects a different
trust model).

> And:
> We might even split option a) in:
> a1) allow keys where I personally signed with casual verification
> a2) allow keys where I personally signed with extensive verification

Doesn't sound like a "let's make this less confusing for non-expert users"
thing. Also, making it configurable seems to imply to me that users would want
to switch back and forth. Otherwise, they would just use the verification effort
they feel comfortable with, and sign keys as "0x10 Generic certification" rather
than using "casual" and "positive" certifications. Without ever seeing those
descriptions, by the way, no need to burden them with those.

HTH,

Peter.

-- 
I use the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in combination with Enigmail.
You can send me encrypted mail if you want some privacy.
My key is available at <http://digitalbrains.com/2012/openpgp-key-peter>



More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list