Interesting thoughts on non-repudiation
April 12th, 2007From Richard Gray’s comment on Jon Udell’s blog:
So long as our online identities are fragile and easily compromised people will be wary to trust them. If we lower the probability of an identity failing, people will, as a result, place more faith in that identity. But if we can’t reduce the probability of failure to zero then when some pour soul suffers the inevitable failure of their identity, so many more people will have placed faith in it that undoing the damage may be almost impossible. It would seem then that the unreliability of our identity is in fact our last line of defence.
I think the potential for web identity theft is very high - someone could go around claiming to be me destroying my reputation and make googling me turn up very bad things. In my case, my blog’s rank in Google might give me the first say with anyone researching me. But I feel sorry for those poor schmucks who have no link love for their own web page and have someone impersonating them online.
Update: Kyle Adams writes in with this account -
Hey Dan, just wanted to let you know that my church is actually stuck in the same situation. Due to a botched hand-off between myself and the previous webmaster, the domain name expired. Godaddy.com actually held onto the domain name for renewal for awhile, but once it got into that limbo neither of us could actually figure out how to renew it.
When the dust settled, a pornographer ended up with the church’s old domain name. Worse still, he used the church’s front page + a bunch of links at the bottom to various sites, probably in an attempt to boost Google rankings. We now have a new domain name (not through godaddy.com) but I’m not really sure how to rescue our old domain from being soiled.
The old website is at http://www.calvincrchurch.com/ - careful though, it locks up my browser. And to give the new website some link-love for Google to boost its page rank, here is the correct Calvin CRC Church website.
April 13th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Hey Dan, just wanted to let you know that my church is actually stuck in the same situation. Due to a botched hand-off between myself and the previous webmaster, the domain name expired. Godaddy.com actually held onto the domain name for renewal for awhile, but once it got into that limbo neither of us could actually figure out how to renew it.
When the dust settled, a pornographer ended up with the church’s old domain name. Worse still, he used the church’s front page + a bunch of links at the bottom to various sites, probably in an attempt to boost Google rankings. We now have a new domain name (not through godaddy.com) but I’m not really sure how to rescue our old domain from being soiled.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Eat a third and drink a third and leave the remaining third of your stomach empty. Then, when you get angry, there will be sufficient room for your rage.