Real / Digital World Analogy
Real world credentials are a diverse social phenomenon, and as such are difficult to define. As with digital signatures it is misleading to assume a direct correspondence between the real-world and the digital concept. This holds even if defining criteria for credentials in the digital world could be agreed on.
The success of digital signatures as a replacement for paper based signatures has lagged behind expectations. On the other hand many unexpected uses of digital signatures were discovered by recent cryptographic research. A related insight that can be learned from digital signatures is that the cryptographic mechanism need not be confused with overall process that turns a digital signature into something that has more or less the same properties as a paper based signature. Electronic signatures such as paper signatures sent by fax may have legal meaning, while secure cryptographic signatures may serve completely different purposes. We need to distinguish the algorithm from the process.
Read more about this topic: Digital Credential
Famous quotes containing the words real, world and/or analogy:
“The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)