Re: [ga] Domain Transfers

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Sat, Dec 15, 2001 at 12:28:53PM -0500, Sandy Harris wrote:
> 
> A fairly obvious and strightforward one would be to require PGP-signing of
> all transactions.

A typical answer from a techie.  :-)

You have invested the time and energy necessary to learn how to use PGP;
most other humans have not.  There are subtle pitfalls in using PGP (and
indeed, any PKI so far in deployment) that are traps for the unwary, and
it actually takes a non-trivial amount of technical sophistication to
understand this.  All things considered, the time and effort coming up
to speed on PGP is in fact substantial -- on the order of person-days,
at least.  Summing that over all domain holders, the cost of your
proposed solution is prohibitive. 

PGP has never made it as a *mainstream* solution for anything, and
probably never will -- it remains a tool for techies.  Until there
is a PKI that operates well on a global basis, no PKI-based solution 
will really be useful.

And even more -- the big problems are not the technology; the big
problems are the human problems of identification in the first place. 
This all interacts with privacy and other concerns; it will be a long
time before it is all sorted out. 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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