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GPG-signed blogging
Here’s an idea.
I was thinking about validating the author of a blog post – or any written information on the net for that matter. PGP/GPG is already an accepted de facto standard for signing of mails and encrypting information. Now I ran across this Firefox extension called FireGPG at http://getfiregpg.org/
I tried it and it works ok, but not really well. Now let’s image the following scenario:
I am a blogger who wants to ensure that everyone can see that I am really the author of my blog post and ideally also the comments I leave on other people’s blogs. Using FireGPG I can already get a piece of that (granted, if I sign a textile’d text I cannot verify the presented text with different markup anymore, but please, bear with me!). But what I really want is to hide the GPG-specific information like “beginning of message” and the signature itself using some CSS:invisible style. However, if anyone wants to verify the validity of the post they could use FireGPG (or whatever tool) and see that this is truely what I wrote and no admin of that blog changed my comment even a bit.
This could also be paired up with the idea of a semantic web and what else…
I think any system that incorporates something like that would truely innovate in todays rather boring CMS/bloggin system universe. I am not looking for another skinning and templating system, but a more trustworthy net.
Let me know what you think, blog about it on your site write me hate-mail – I am really interested in your opinion on this.
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Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: GPG-signed blogging
Good news, nobody hates the idea. Bad news, nobody really finds this interesting enough to leave even the shortest comment. Maybe this is just too geeky ;-)
Yoko for Textpattern – A free blog theme • Minimum Theme – If all you want to do is write.
Note: I am currently not actively using Textpattern, so I am not in the forums very often
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Re: GPG-signed blogging
stephan wrote:
Good news, nobody hates the idea. Bad news, nobody really finds this interesting enough
Interim news, I missed this first time round :-)
I haven’t looked at it extensively, but I would think — like you say — if you could surround the BEGIN and END blocks with a suitable CSS class you could use a jQuery show/hide, or a simple CSS display:hide / display:block with a javascript toggle to show/hide the authenticaton stamp, or fingerprint, or whatever else is associated with that post or comment.
It may not be as simple as that because you may not be able to target the particular parts individually (for example, with individual comments). If I get a chance to look at it and its API further I might have a play. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of firegpg.
Last edited by Bloke (2009-03-30 14:29:52)
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