[PLUG] GAIM and MSN

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Wed Oct 22 11:06:02 UTC 2003


On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Jason Van Clere wrote:
> (Of course, the idea is to be able to meet someone in a bar and say,
> "Look for me on [Jason's-perfect-world-IM-protocol].  My nick is
> zaphod42."  And that would do it.  No connecting to a specific network a
> la IRC; and if I had given my nick to someone eight years prior, they
> could still find me, etc., etc. . . .)

I don't think you could do such a thing without centralized authority.
Otherwise, how do you handle name conflicts?

It could be managed individually in a similar way to DNS, I suppose.

Imagine that you register a name and the rootservers tell the client your
public key and then you authenticate with the server via your private key.

However, at that point you may as well just use an email address that has
a public key registered with one of the standard keyservers.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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