[cap-talk] Firefox breaks the principle of identifiability

[Bill Frantz]

On 2/8/05, donnelley1 at webstart.com (Jed at Webstart) wrote:

>"Bank of America suggests the binding of the name
>'Paypal' with the URL https://www.paypal.com/
>and the certificate fingerprint:
>A9:04:4D:C2:74:5E:05:D9:28:44:E0:8C:53:E2:31:9A

One problem with this suggestion is that it doesn't defend against name confusion in the selected pet names.  (I also think the same problem exists with a visual, logo based approach.)  I think the problem exists whether the system suggests a name or whether the user comes up with it without help.

For purely syntactic name confusions, like the paypal vs. paypa1 confusion, an algorithmically based solution could show the user the already assigned pet names which are "close".  In the case of semantically similar names; for example my wife uses "speleo", and I use "caving"; I don't see any algorithmic solution.  For logo case, there would need to be a way of showing images that were "close" to other images as perceived by humans.

However, just because we may not be able to completely solve the entire problem is not an excuse for failure to apply relatively simple algorithmic solutions.

Cheers - Bill

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