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Tuesday, May 20, 2003
I've been looking at [Advogato's trust metric] as a model for how to implement a simple trust model for email. While Advogato sure is interesting (read the paper), the concepts the model is based on don't seem to carry over well to email. Avogato is a community discussion website, so the model is based on peer review- which doesn't really work well for email (other than mailing lists, maybe).
Let's say Alice and Bob are friends. Charlie is Bob's friend. For Alice to trust Charlie, Bob must tell Alice how much he trusts her. And for it to be practical, she has to get second opinions from other sources she trusts before she can trust Bob. So Bob and Alice would have to exchange lists of trusted users, and even better those would have to be stored at a trusted 3rd party's server and compared against all other trust lists to calculate Charlie's trust metric.
So even if we created something like this that was Rendesvous enabled to share trust lists peer to peer, it wouldn't work well for email, since it's not broad enough. If there was a central service that could store lists and calculate trust metrics, that would be great- but it's way beyond what I want to do for EvilToaster. But the trust metrics model he describes could be very useful for instant messaging, or even news stories.
But, sadly, it doesn't work for email as far as I can see. For person-to-person communications like most email is, it would only seem to work for mailing lists and corporate environments (where, granted, a trust metric MIGHT COME IN HANDY).
[ 5/20/2003 12:21:00 PM ] [
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