From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 09:09:12 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: subjective names and MITM
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951005111048.24409B-100000@eskimo.com>
Message-ID: <199510061608.JAA17323@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


m5@dev.tivoli.com (Mike McNally) writes, quoting me:

Mike>Seems to me that the idea of "communicating with the person you think
Mike>you are" is intractably difficult if you're not sitting in the same
Mike>room. ...

Hal> I can certainly agree with the attractive simplicity of this notion.  My
Hal> point is that it is practically useless. ...

Mike>Oddly enough, it seems to me that Hal (if that really *is* his name)
Mike>and I (and Carl & others) are saying basically the same things, but
Mike>drawing completely different conclusions.  Strange.  I'm willing to
Mike>wait to see what the peer review process concludes.

I am afraid you have quoted this out of context and thereby exactly
reversed the sense of what I was saying.  Hence we are not saying the
same things, but rather we are saying opposite things.  The full quote is:

Mike>Seems to me that the idea of "communicating with the person you think
Mike>you are" is intractably difficult if you're not sitting in the same
Mike>room.  If you accept instead the idea of "communicating with the
Mike>entity possessing the private half of a keypair" then life gets a lot
Mike>simpler. 

Hal>I can certainly agree with the attractive simplicity of this notion.  My
Hal>point is that it is practically useless.

By "this notion" I was referring to the second sentence rather than the
first, the idea that we are communicating with whomever holds the key.
This was the one which you said would make life simpler, and so I hoped
that by agreeing about its simplicity it would be clear which of the two
competing ideas I was referring to.  Apparently it was ambiguous, so I
apologize for being unclear.

It is disturbing that even after reading that very long message my
position could be interpreted as being the opposite of what it is.
Apparently my arguments are not being well understood.  I will have to
think about this issue more and try to express myself better.

Hal