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Fixing trust on the Internet
Tom Marble
The challenge with centralized network services isn't just that users may not have software freedom: data matters too. This talk explores the contours of trust on the Internet in the context of verifying network services and how we might craft solutions that match the spirit of the four freedoms of free software. We need an application level API that allows us to corroborate trust assertions and increase (or decrease) our confidence in the assertions based on our transitive trust network. Before choosing to use a network service, users need confidence that the service is free software, provides the complete and corresponding source, can be built reproducibly and that such builds were verified by people those users trust. To bring software freedom to network services users we must create a new trust model for the Internet that manages identity, authentication and assertions at the application level for the Free software services we write and share. We can build it!