Recently, the Shmoo Group discovered that Firefox is vulnerable to precisely the exploit that i predicted in my 2002 paper—Ping

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The central point of my essay on the petname toolbar is that phishing is the result of name conflation.—Tyler

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So how, in this system, does the user come to trust Paypal (as opposed to someone pretending to be Paypal)?—Ben

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If I’m understanding the discussion so far, I think the answer is that the issue of trust is separate from the issue of identity.—Jed

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Indeed, but I am no closer to understanding how the user ever gets to a state where they can do anything useful.—Ben

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I gave some examples in my next message on this topic. Perhaps you could address them.—Jed

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I agree it solves the problem of confusable URLs.—Ben

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What don’t you believe is practical?—Jed

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Let’s say I start with actually visiting my bank, and getting the fingerprint of their cert. I then tediously type that into my machine.—Ben

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Forget the tedious typing. You give them your smart card (or something like) and they add a Petname binding to it.—Jed

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I’m sorry to be such a curmudgeon here, but-- this doesn’t sound like a solution I can get terribly excited about.—David

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To communicate about third parties, we need to first securely agree on a common semantics. The problem of secure general agreement is a property rights problem, and particular a property titles problem. It’s like agreeing on who owns the land, and what are its boundaries. I’ve tackled this problem in depth at <szabo.best.vwh.net> More information on the distributed database system that the secure title system is based on can be found at <szabo.best.vwh.net>—szabo

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This doesn’t help when the namespace crosses legal boundaries. —Sandro

Trademark and fraud law have been dealing with cross-boundary issues for centuries. Mind you, there are still many imperfections—witness for example the century-old battle over "Budweiser" (see e.g. <cipr.org>—szabo

Right, and if there is a way to avoid these conflicts in the first place, I’d be all for that instead. —Sandro