Terrific example

Terrific example

Posted Feb 19, 2010 7:54 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Good idea, but don't expect too much by iabervon
Parent article: Trust, but verify

When I contact my credit card company, I do so by calling the phone number printed on my credit card.

Yup. And by doing this you blindly trust your telecom provider, your phone manufacturer, producer of the CPU for you phone, producer of the OS for you phone and so on.

When I mail them a check, it goes to an address that I am familiar with from when I opened the account.

But you use another organization certified by trusted authority - be it USPS or DHL. Heck, when you visit USPS or DHL office you trust the sign on doors - and integrity of this sign is guaranteed by central authority (called government)!

In none of these cases do the parties use an arbitrary trusted authority.

Sure they do. More often then not there are a lot of parties involved which are used because they are certified by central authority (they have a license from government or they are certified by some agency licensed by government, etc).

It's good idea to use web-of-trust-like models to get a second opinion (today's browser implement it via different services designed to prevent scams), but to try to replace usual chain of certificates with web-of-trust model... that's just crazy.

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