D&C Lug - Home Page
Devon & Cornwall Linux Users' Group

[ Date Index ][ Thread Index ]
[ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] pgp thang



On Thu, 6 Nov 2003 21:36:49 +0000
Neil Williams <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Neil,

> > Phew!  A long reply.  Not what I was expecting, at all.   :-)
> Yeah, I get told I'm long winded but hey, this ends up on a public
> archive and sometimes it's best to cover more of the audience than the
> composer of the previous thread. Maybe.

Quite so.  Some people get uptight about it, though.  As a result, I
often add a comment like "You probably already know", or "At the risk of
teaching Grandma to suck eggs".  If I know they won't take offence,
though...

> > meeting up was non-existent, due to the fact I live in the UK, and
> > some of the other people lived as far apart as New Zealand, South
> > Africa, and Sweden.
> There are ways around that, -ish. There are intermediaries, after all,
> my key has been signed by Kai who spends time in Finland. It's not
> that far fetched to consider someone else in Finland who has signed
> Kai's key and also signed a well-known key in Sweden. That in turn
> could link to the key you want to trust. Both my key and Kai's key are
> signed by Debian developers who do meet across geographical
> boundaries, a little knock-on effect and I reckon NZ and SA are not
> beyond the scope of the web of trust. I've got some long-distance keys
> in my keyring (from correspondence on gnupg-users) which show as fully
> trusted and one owner lives in Australia (if you can believe the TLD).

It's that sort of thing that I meant when I said about jumping through
hoops.  It got quite convoluted.  All fun, though.

> Getting your key signed by as many local people as you can will not
> harm the possibility of such a connection - you're almost bound to
> meet someone whose work or lifestyle allows keysigning across

I've always got my eyes open for key signing parties, etc.

> I find this site invaluable in this type of connection:
> http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jc/wotsap/

Noted, for future reference.

> There have been odd occassions that I've imported a key via
> auto-key-retrieve that has become instantly fully trusted because of
> the web of trust. It does work.

Of course.  If it didn't, there wouldn't be any point, would there?  
:-)

-- 
 Regards   _
          / )        "The blindingly obvious is
	 / _)rad     never immediately apparent"

--
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the
message body to unsubscribe.


Lynx friendly