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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I’m glad to see discussion in this thread about how to make Pet Names more usable—this is needed. But even after the best usability improvements we can muster, what you say above may still be true. As a computer scientist, you must have a deep appreciation of impossibility results—it keeps us from barking up the wrong tree, no matter how attractive that tree is.

Limitless energy would be nice, and people have tried many designs for perpetual motion machines. You tell me now that creation of net energy is impossible, and further, you show me a machine that actually *looses* net energy as it operates.

Maybe this is the best we can do and still produce useful motion. Could be. But if so...

So let us all lament the impossibility. We can now proceed to the useful talk of improving the design so that it looses less energy.—Mark