Re: [atlarge-discuss] online voting

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@vitaminic.net>]

On Thu, 16 May 2002 11:11:17 -0500, you wrote:

>organization.  You might accept PGP keys with only email verification,
>you might accept them printed out and sent by normal mail, you might
>accept keys that have been signed into the global web of trust.  Each
>approach offers a different degree of authenticity, and carries with it
>a different degree of overhead.

In fact, that's exactly what I am thinking of. The original ICANN
proposal was to identify people by having them register a domain name
and be listed on a WHOIS server - which was an unsecure method, costly
for the user, and easily capturable by registries and registrars
(though perhaps these were appreciable features for some of those who
drafted that proposal).

My idea for what we are doing now (which, to make it clearer for
people who are not involved directly, is building an independent
verified membership roll for ICANN that can later be used to have
elections for user representatives in the unlikely case that ICANN
will accept this, see www.icannatlarge.com) is that we should employ a
wide number of different authentication methods, not necessarily
PGP-based (as the target is much less technical). Surely using the
official certification authorities as created by law in the US and EU
and other countries would be fine, but that cannot be the only method,
as certificates are costly, not yet spread enough, and we have a
worldwide target (so we have to take developing countries into account
too). Having members introduce other members would be nice, though
there have to be strict provisions to prevent frauds. Sending scanned
images of official ID documents would be fine too, if we can prevent
people from using Photoshop (er... ok, gimp or ImageMagick) to fake
them.

Moreover, my idea is that we should decentralize this as much as
possible: you lose in safety, but the system you build is much less
subject to capture and single points of failure, and much less costly.
So I would be quite happy to accept "Debian-certified individuals" in
the membership, for example.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola     <vb@vitaminic.net>    Ph. +39 011 23381220
Vitaminic [The Music Evolution] - Vice President for Technology

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