Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Roedy Green]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005 13:44:42 GMT, Tim Tyler <tim at tt1lock.org>  wrote or
quoted :

>``Like ICQ, someone cannot send you mail without your prior permission. 
>  They can't send you mail because they don't have your public key to
>  encrypt the mail.''
>
>...is pretty confusing - because "public key" is a term with a technical
>meaning in cryptography - and a public key really *is* public.

What I envisioned was you would give a "public" key to someone you
wanted to converse with you.  He would encrypt all mail with that.  He
could give that key to someone else, who could then impersonate him.

Most likely that second person would be his laptop. 

Let's say he posted the key in the New York Times, then anyone could
impersonate him.  You would the deactivate him, just as if he were a
spammer.  You might or might not give him a new key when he begged for
permission to communicate.

In my opinion, the weakest link in my scheme is the initial beg for
permission to send.  Here a stranger has to, in one line, tell you who
he is and why he wants to talk to you. This is much like a spam title
that tries to trick you into reading the body of the message.  You
still need spam list to help filter these types out.

My scheme should work fine if you are not someone like me who gets a
lot of legit mail from strangers.

Perhaps you could slow them down with some randomly chosen questions
to prove they know something about you.  Companies could do the same
thing.

You can inconvenience the sender to a fair degree since most people
don't often write strangers with the expectation of a personal
correspondence.




-- 
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
http://mindprod.com Again taking new Java programming contracts.