[LINK] astroturfing

[Fernando Cassia]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 21:09, jim birch <planetjim at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Personally (without having considered this to much) I think I'd be happy to
> only ever receive communications from validated identities with a good
> reputation, or have communications flagged with the sender reputation,
> good, bad or unknown.  I think it would be possible to design a federated
> system that supports this kind of approach.  This wouldn't fully prevent
> scams but would make life more difficult for serial offenders.

S/MIME.

To purchase a S/MIME certificate for signing e-mails, Thawte used to
offer a free version of the certificate (it only certifies that
e-mails come from a certain account) or you could go the extra length
and pay for a S/MIME certificate that had you identity (full name and
nationality) attached to it. Before issuing such certificate, the
certificate issuer requested that your identity be validated by a
local attorney, bank, or other such institution with legal power to
validate your identity. Thawte called this the "web of trust". (ie
Thawte relied on local attorneys, banks etc to validate who you really
are, physically).

S/MIME has been around since the Netscape Communicator 4.x days, and
I´ve used S/MIME certificates in the past (but only the free version,
that validates e-mail addresses not identity).

Nowadays, most -if not all- serious e-mail clients support S/MIME,
Mozilla Thunderbird,  Mozilla SeaMonkey, and Outlook I´m sure. There´s
even free open source plug-ins to do S/MIME over Blackberry.

http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Java-Development/BIS-compatible-open-source-S-MIME-email-encryption-for/td-p/492351

http://www.marknoble.com/tutorial/smime/smime.aspx

Unfortunately Thawte seems to have discontinued its free s/mime
certificates giveaway, but other S/Mime certificate issuers like
Verisign remain...

http://www.verisign.com/digital-id/index.html

http://www.globalsign.com/authentication-secure-email/digital-id/index.html

Ultimately, I think each government will sooner or later take the role
of issuing digital certificates to each of its citizens... I mean, if
you´ve got your own national ID card or driver´s license, why not
request a S/MIME certificate to go along with it?.

Although I´m sure the US of A will surely prefer the free market
version, because we all know Merryl Lynch, BofA, Goldman Sachs and
HSBC are much more trustworthy than any government institution.
*cough*

Just my $0.02
FC