January 22, 2003
Key discovery
Justin raises questions about discovery of keys. What he's suggesting is exactly where I'm thinking is worth heading. The trouble with any form of identification is the hassle of remembering it. Making use of something that's useful and memorable while preserving it's value it tricky. We all usually end up using bogus e-mail addresses or login names because we don't want the spammers sending us porno junk mail. As a result it's very difficult to make legitimate use of a memorable snippet.
My feeling is that using of PKI will help but at the cost of user hassle. There's just not a way around it. At this point it's looking like the least worst way is via a PGP key. If, as Justin suggests, a bookmarklet can be made AND the comment forms can be configured to use it then we might be onto a good solution.
What Justin is suggesting is that his bookmarklet will perform a javascript call to the page. If the site supports this effort the call will preload some data into the page. The user will be freed of having to diddle around with cutting and pasting. This is a good thing. It's dependent upon sites deciding to implement the pieces underneath it. I sense we'll see some progress on this this week so stay tuned.
