SSL's identity problem
One of the many problems of SSL, especially on the web, is thatit gets its idea of identity wrong (in practice, in actualimplementations). SSL's version of identity is all tied to abstruse X.509 things, all CN and O andOU and so on, but on the real Internet, users don't think of identitythat way; they think of identity as websites, or more exactly of somepersonal label that they have for the entity that stands behind awebsite
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Why? You might ask. As Gordon Livingston has pointed out, life's two most important questions are "Why?" and "Why not
What is guaranteed in languages in practice
In theory, what is guaranteed in a language is the things that arein its (official) specification; if the specification is silent orsays that something is not guaranteed, it isn't, regardless of howimplementations behave.
More and more I have come to believe that this is mistaken, and that inpractice what is guaranteed in a language is what programmers code to,regardless of what the specification says. This is because of simplepragmatics: a new implementation that does not run most of the existingcode