Re: gsu (Was Re: More Political Stuff)

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 07:30:04PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> There's a big reason Debian never did the digital signatures, which is
> that it tends to take on a responsibility/liability that most
> volunteers won't be willing to take on. 

Microsoft and Netscape both had thisproblem with secure signed web pages.
In the end, they both decided that all the digital signature can tell
you is that the data you downloaded matches the signature.

The first signed ActiveX control for downloding actually shut your
computer down, as a demonstration of this distinction.

You can never promise that something is safe, only that you don't
know that it has any problems.

Lee (Ankh)

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam@holoweb.net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999