[Freedombox-discuss] human-meaningful names and zooko's triangle [was: Re: FOAF developers taking FreedomBox into their equation]

Adam Zimmerman adam at digitalpirate.ca
Wed Mar 16 15:31:37 UTC 2011


On 11-03-16 03:14 AM, Henry Story wrote:
> I came across Zooko's triangle in a few recent posts by Dan Kaminsky, of which this one
>    http://dankaminsky.com/2011/01/13/spelunk-tri/

For those who are interested (and thinking about implementing naming
systems like this), I'd also recommend this post by Paul Crowley:

http://www.lshift.net/blog/2007/11/21/squaring-zookos-triangle-part-two

In addition to proposing his own system, he also makes two interesting
points about the problem:
- Zooko's triangle actually has 4 properties, but people generally treat
one of them as essential and don't mention it
- Instead of entirely dropping one of the properties of a naming system,
you can make a tradeoff. By lowering (but not eliminating) the
memorability of a name and the security of the system, you can still
keep all the properties

Overall, I still like petname systems more than the one that Crowley
proposes, but it's more food for thought which is always nice.

Cheers,

- Adam



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