[Foundation-l] OT: Re: PGP-keysign at the tech/chapter-meeting

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro at gmail.com
Sat Apr 4 10:37:22 UTC 2009


This is widely off topic, I know...

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>   
>> Private keys can be compromised by anyone with a whim and a few
>> thousand dollars, either physically by compromise of the device, or
>> remotely by social engineering or zero-day exploit. Key signing
>> parties are premised on the idea that private keys are really private.
>> Since they aren't, the additional security of a real-life meeting is
>> somewhat farcical.
>>     
>
> Moreover, what's to stop someone from showing up and claiming to be
> you?  How are you going to confirm that -- by their telling you
> they're coming and what they look like, over the Internet?  Why don't
> they just sign your keys over the Internet and skip the middle-man?
>
> Not to be negative or anything, sorry.  (I'm not even going to be there.)
>
>   

Personally (even though I don't have tattoos) I think I
could give details of myself that would be somewhat
difficult to forge on short notice. The index finger of
my right hand sports a completely healed up lack
of nail. That is to say my index finger has a shrunken
leathery surface where usually there would be a nail.

my left wrist on the backside also has three round
scars, where I have burnt them with various cigarettes
and cigars, in a roughly belt of Orion pattern, and my
chin has a prominent scar on the underside from when
I jumped into the pool as a child, backwards, taking a
seriously too short a step :-D ( I cringe every time I hear
the famous quote by John Glenn :-) This story benefits
from me mentioning that after the cranial shock of
nearly dislocating my head from my neck, I subsequently
promptly ran head first into a window that was open, and
just managed to ignore the presence of, giving me a much
more short lived scar on my forehead as well.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen




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