Meeting minutes
Ivan_Herman: Sorry, I'm late.
Wesley_Smith: Hey folks, sorry I'm had a call run slightly welcome to the September 21st meeting of the barcodes data integrity. and now also bitstring status list and forgery defense task force. the agenda for today is much the same as normal. We will go through agenda, process, introduction, announcement items and then as needed we will do pull request review and issue processing for the previously mentioned specs as needed. with that in mind, does anybody have any announcement, introduction, agenda requests or process items they'd like to discuss?
Wesley_Smith: All right. It doesn't sound like Ivonne, I know you and Manu were discussing the publication of the threat models extensively on the mailing list.
Wesley_Smith: Is that a topic that could use some call time today?
Ivan_Herman: Not for me.
Ivan_Herman: Money is not yet here. Maybe Wesley Smith:
Blog Post and Press Release Discussion
Wesley_Smith: All right, that sounds good. I suppose one agenda item I'd like to briefly discuss the blog post press release content that we shared last week as that came about because of a discussion on this task force call. I think we should reiterate that a little bit and make sure we're kind of all on the same page going into the larger working group call on Wednesday.
Wesley_Smith: No hand.
Ivan_Herman: Yeah. No,…
Ivan_Herman: it will be on the agenda for the global call. I've just come out of the chair's code. That's why I'm saying
Wesley_Smith: That sounds good. all right. So, if there are no other items for the beginning of the call today, we can go straight into that. so last week after the main working group call I sent out a draft of some text to be potentially published by the working group andor W3C. if you have not read and reviewed that text, I would very much appreciate it if you would do so. It's a short persuasive piece arguing that BC barcodes are uniquely well equipped to deal with the kind of attacks that these data breaches allow. specifically with the combination of a digital signature and a real-time revocation mechanism.
Wesley_Smith: We note extensively in that piece that breaches of the form that we just saw with hundreds of millions of images of physical documents, highquality, high resolution scans of these documents, digital signatures don't do much. because a high resolution image of a digital signature embedded in a barcode will pass verification just like the original. and so there are attacks that you can do with those leaked images that a digital signature does not stop but a revocation mechanism does. Ela, go ahead.
Elaine_Wooton: Yeah, I hate to even use time for this, but I just wanted to thank you for writing that up,…
Elaine_Wooton: and I think you did a great job.
Wesley_Smith: …
Wesley_Smith: thank you, Lane. Much appreciated. I'm seeing lots of nice emojis. Thank you all. I assume that means that most of you have read it. that's great. If you have not, please do. and any feedback at all, please let me know. Much appreciated.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Could you possibly paste a link to that?
Wesley_Smith: Okay. Yeah, let me go find that for you. Phil, go ahead while I do that.
Phillip Long: Yeah, I should have said this request for announcements. there is a meeting in November in the US in Park City, Utah associated with the SETI project SEDI which is working on state endorsed digital identifiers where they will be announcing a coalition of US states that are interested in following Utah's lead. it is coincident with the National Governor's Association in the US which is also in Park City that same week and that's no coincidence as they're hoping to get as many governors and other state officials to come over to the SETI meeting. and I mention it mainly because one of the main topics is fraud and the threat of fraud…
Ivan_Herman: Oops.
Phillip Long: related to the announcements that you just asked us reminded us to reread.
Phillip Long: And so if anybody's interested in that meeting, let me know and I can give you details.
Wesley_Smith: Yeah, thank you for the heads up there.
Wesley_Smith: It sounds like there are quite a lot of these meetings coming up between, powerful organizations that are very interested in things like physical document fraud and security. all of that is I think good motivation for us to be more engaged with the world on what we're doing. So with that note, I think maybe would it be worth discussing what the next steps are? Ivonne, I know that we had talked about a blog post. We had talked about a more formal press release. We're going to discuss with the working group. and any decision we make needs to be approved by the working group for the working group to engage.
Wesley_Smith: However before that call I am curious what you think the realistic next steps are going to be if the working group agrees to our proposed text.
Ivan_Herman: Blog is already accepted by Kohali.
Ivan_Herman: She was asking for some metadata which we have to agree probably on Wednesday. but this is absolutely clear that it will go through press release frankly I don't believe so we can ask her when we submit we can ask her…
Wesley_Smith: Understood.
Ivan_Herman: but as I said I don't even know when we had a press release for the last
Wesley_Smith: So, is it possible that potentially we could set up a meeting to discuss that option? I'd be happy to get on a call with W3C staff and advocate for the kind of the immediacy of the problem and…
Ivan_Herman: The problem is the problem.
Wesley_Smith: Sorry. Go ahead.
Ivan_Herman: The problem is simply that I have no idea how the comm team organizes press releases these days.
Wesley_Smith: So I …
Ivan_Herman: It's nothing against this topic.
Wesley_Smith: sorry. Understood.
Ivan_Herman: It's not the problem with this topic at all.
Wesley_Smith: It really sounds like we need to do some kind of discovery then. Would the best way to do that be getting the comm's team on a meeting? So we can ask say hey and we don't need to even overfocus on a press release. We can say we're going to do a blog post on this. That's wonderful. the iron is extremely hot on this particular topic right now. These organizations are going to be meeting in the next month to discuss this. There was recently the largest ever security vulnerability of its kind in the wild and it's what our technology solves. That sort of thing.
Wesley_Smith: I think if we can make that kind of argument on the call with the comm's team and say, if we can do a press release, great. If we can't do a press release, what can we do? We want to get the word out here. The iron's hot.
Wesley_Smith: What can we do besides a blog post to have, W3C staff and leadership more actively engaged with this work? Does that sound like something we could do?
Ivan_Herman: We can try.
Ivan_Herman: Let's not focus on press release. Wesley Smith:
Wesley_Smith: Yeah, that's totally fine. we can say, "Hey, the blog post is great. We want to do more. How can we better distribute this, platform it, so on and so forth." and I'm happy to do that kind of advocacy. set up that meeting, whatever's necessary. So let me know.
Ivan_Herman: Once we have the stuff ready, which should be Wednesday evening my time, then we will have to contact her. I don't know…
Wesley_Smith: Right. Yep.
Ivan_Herman: who will do that.
Ivan_Herman: probably the chairs if it is something which is in the name of the burking group and we can formulate something on Wednesday on what else we should say kali but then we'll see…
Ivan_Herman: what she replies I don't know…
Wesley_Smith: That sounds good. and I'll try to make clear to them that we're interested in, platforming this in any way possible. and working with the comm's team to do so.
Ivan_Herman: what the mechanism they have these days. yeah,…
Wesley_Smith: That sounds like what we need to have that meeting to find out. right,…
Ivan_Herman: I wasn't involved in the com team for many years now. So that's…
Wesley_Smith: that sounds good.
Ivan_Herman: why I'm a bit evasive because I just simply don't know.
Wesley_Smith: So you'd mentioned that you said the blog post was very likely to happen.
Wesley_Smith: Has the comms team so that the text has already been reviewed by the comm's team?
Ivan_Herman: No, it's not very likely to happen.
Ivan_Herman: It has been accepted. It will happen. she already saw the text and she was asking for some code that they could reuse somewhere and she was asking whether we produce I was wondering whether the pictures you have in the spec can be shared as part of the blog post,…
Ivan_Herman: things like that.
Wesley_Smith: Yeah, sorry.
Wesley_Smith: Was there an email from you that I missed on that topic?
Ivan_Herman: I was wondering why there was an email from her.
Wesley_Smith: If I missed it, I apologize. let's work that out off the call.
Ivan_Herman: I see what happened. She sent it to the chairs only. Okay.
Ivan_Herman: So where should I send it to you only okay I do that now and…
Wesley_Smith: Yeah,…
Wesley_Smith: that's fine. maybe CC Monu.
Ivan_Herman: then we can involve whoever as we think that's…
Wesley_Smith: That sounds good. Yeah, we can work that out.
Ivan_Herman: what I'm saying she has already agreed that's not the …
Wesley_Smith: Okay, wonderful. yeah, and maybe if that's an active thread with her, then we could broach the topic of other publication venues and Understood.
Ivan_Herman: I know that the blog is spread over various social sites which we do as the members or whoever else is around and W3C does it sort of officially on Masttodon on I think blue sky I am not
Ivan_Herman: But I forward it to blue sky. So that's easy. I don't think that we are communicating through X for various reasons that you can imagine.
Ivan_Herman: U so those things will happen almost automatically as part of the blog post. So that's not a question. I don't know what else is out there that could be done this way.
Wesley_Smith: All right.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: My god.
Wesley_Smith: I will make sure I get in touch with her to find that out. And Ivon,…
Ivan_Herman: Yeah. Cool.
Wesley_Smith: thank you so much for …
Wesley_Smith: prosecuting this through to this point and getting that blog post ready to go. Ted, do you have your hand up?
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Yeah, once that blog post live on the W3 site. Each and every one of us should post pointers back to it from our ex or Twitter or Blue Sky or LinkedIn or whatever social site.
Ivan_Herman: Yes, absolutely.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Together we have a lot more reach than any of us individually including W3 individually.
Ivan_Herman: I agree. I don't think that the press release would have more effect.
Wesley_Smith: That sounds good.
Wesley_Smith: Plus one. We should definitely do that. All anybody have anything else to note on that topic? or are we good to Ah,…
Ivan_Herman: So I had this question about the illustrations.
Ivan_Herman: She's asking that is it something that we can share.
Wesley_Smith: I don't know. I have to double check exactly what's there to see how useful that stuff will be. But yeah, for I mean right I mean I guess…
Ivan_Herman: It's only illustration. it's the driving license with our stuff on it.
Wesley_Smith: what I'm saying is it will be an image of a driver's license with a slightly bigger barcode and…
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Any picture increases pickup and…
Ivan_Herman: Yeah. I understand the Yes,…
Wesley_Smith: then we'll say trust us this is a special barcode.
Greg_Bernstein: But it's a picture.
Wesley_Smith: Yeah. Yeah.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: actual reading of the post etc.
Ivan_Herman: it's all touching. Okay.
Wesley_Smith: Absolutely. I will want to verify that the exact pictures used are the most up-to-date in case technical folks want to dissect that blog post and point out problems and that sort of thing. so I'll make sure that the right images are used. but that should be totally fine. Yeah. All right. Anything else on that topic? All right, thank you all for the engagement thus far. Greg Bernstein, I saw you posted links to some data integrity issues. Would you like to take the floor for a data integrity discussion now?
Greg_Bernstein: that would be great.
Wesley_Smith: All right,…
Greg_Bernstein: …
Wesley_Smith: over to you.
Data Integrity Issues and Optimizations
Greg_Bernstein: we've been proceeding as usual. we've had PRs that we've been incorporating and updating and things like that, but, a couple issues just got posted. one is a bug in our salted hash approach which can lead to revealing data. Basically, I think I made a mistake and overprotected some of the fields which led to having to reveal more than we needed to with the things called the salts. So, there was a very good issue posted by somebody named Devin out of Beijing. and so I'm updating the shock
Greg_Bernstein: approach right now and I think I haven't confirmed yet there may be an indexing issue. so I still have to double check on that. The other one is I never looked into this before but for reducing an optimization for reducing the size of the alted hash approach when we have a lot of claims he's saying hey why don't we consider what's known as a Merkel tree encoding I don't know if anybody had looked at that before he cited some references even some W3C work that might have looked gone down that road. So I was going to look in that.
Greg_Bernstein: Dave, did we ever anybody look at any Merkel pre-based encoding of stuff?
Dave Longley: Yeah, that's been explored over time. it has additional complexity. It may not be worth the additional complexity. so that's something to consider especially for larger credentials like student transcripts. once we had the the filtering signature approach or signing individual claims, that's what we call it today.
Greg_Bernstein: Yep. Yeah.
Dave Longley: Once we had that approach, we didn't have to worry about all that extra complexity. So we might want to reconsider it now that we're looking at adding the salted hash stuff back in. So we might want to look and see how challenging it would be to do a Merkel tree with it.
Greg_Bernstein: Yeah, his issue posts were fairly complete with fixes. And then he actually asked if about looking into it. And I said, " if you got some time to help me look into the complexity of that." let's see. But if you read the guy this person's posts, they were quite good at analyzing the bug in the salted hash and then he did a separate post on optimization. So I thought that was very encouraging because that also means more people are getting hands on and checking these things. so that's actually what I'm looking at.
Greg_Bernstein: I wanted to note that Ivonne had you notice some inconsistencies in some of our tables. I am happy to update the tables to put in the fields as long as they look okay when they get formatted and I didn't make them too many columns. But I really like having all the information in one place as much as possible. I mean, sometimes you need extra information details, but any of those kind of things, please just post the issue and suggestion about what you want Ivana has done and I can put it in or post an issue and do a PR. But I know some people don't like to do PRs.
Greg_Bernstein: So they just edit on them but that it'll get rolled in.
Greg_Bernstein: So that's what's happening there. If I okay,…
Ivan_Herman: I am not shy creating a PR…
Ivan_Herman: but there were information that I am not sure about. that's why I would prefer you do that because there are some extra information in one of the I don't remember it was the hash size or something similar that I simply technically do not know. So I prefer not to go there. That's why I didn't raise a PR directly.
Greg_Bernstein: no worries.
Greg_Bernstein: I have the one issue that's overhanging for me is I have not heard any updates from my European partners. somebody did say it was proposal season or something in Europe and so everybody's heads down writing proposals. I don't really know if that's done yet or not, but I've heard completes. I haven't heard anything. And I was just getting ready to try and update how we handle options and I was going to use BBS as my test case. This is for selective disclosure. We can have additional proof things added. there is a nice paper written about how you'd go about doing this.
Greg_Bernstein: I even saw there's going to be a NIST thing that uses a similar technique. This kind of notion of what we call committed disclosure. That means you don't reve you reveal a commitment to the thing. So it's binding to whatever value or statement you've made, but it's also hiding. And so you can use it in these zero knowledge proof things. The NIST seminar coming up has to do with verifiable voting which is very strange for NIST to be talking about now but given the current politics but this concept of committed disclosure where you then do additional proofs on it. It's a natural for
Greg_Bernstein: any combining with any of our selective disclosure schemes to add additional proofs about things which I call below the statement level because right now we do things at the statement level and that's where the U JSONLD RDFC stuff really shines. It breaks us down into nice consistent statements that we can work with. And that's how all the magic that we use for making selective disclosure work. But you may say, what if I want to go below the level A statement saying, I've got a bank account with X amount of dollars in it.
Greg_Bernstein: Instead, you want a statement that says, "I've got a bank account that has at least x amount of dollars in it at least to as little as you'd like." And so that's where we're at. I published Wesley. Go ahead.
Wesley_Smith: I have a question about the Merkel tree topic from earlier.
Greg_Bernstein: That was the thought is I'd like to make it easy for us to add options through addendums or easy add just a block of text. This is an optional feature.
Greg_Bernstein: It all gets done in one place and we have a good hook from the selective disclosure procedures into an optional feature so we don't have to mess with the main text or we even just publish a separate document with this optional feature. That's what I'm kind of doing. So I'm looking at this structure. I was kind of using BBS as my example, but the BBS saga as far as trying to get the authors of the core draft to move forward and sometimes we get a lot of help from Europe trying to put pressure on them and sometimes Europe goes silent. So that was it.
Wesley_Smith: Back to the Merkel Street topic,…
Greg_Bernstein: Back to you, Wesley.
Wesley_Smith: I just read through, the issue that you linked. my first question and forgive my ignorance is that it seems like that would require pretty extensive protocol work because there's a tremendous amount of structure in the Merkel tree solution that isn't required in other solutions. is that the case or does what we have from a protocol perspective already sharing over the set of Merkel tree components needed to do the reconstruction and verification.
Greg_Bernstein: I let mono chime in unless he's not going to hit this issue.
Manu_Sporny: No, not on this issue.
Greg_Bernstein: Okay. Dave, did you want to take on the Merkel tree?
Greg_Bernstein: I mean,
Dave Longley: Yeah, I don't think there's any additional protocol work that's required.
Dave Longley: My understanding is when you do the issuance, you can assemble the Merkel tree. and when you're doing a derived credential, you select all the claims you want. you would produce a Merkel tree proof from from the leaves all the way up to the base Merkel thing and whoever is doing the verification has to understand that it is that the structure of that proof and that you're going from the leaves to the base but I don't think there's any additional protocol work that has to happen in order to do issuance or to ask for something or to do presentation I think everything can be done at the ends…
Dave Longley: unless there's Something I'm forgetting. I haven't looked at it in a
Wesley_Smith: So just jumping here really quick.
Wesley_Smith: My understanding of what you just said is that the protocols that we have allow for appropriately abstract concept of a proof such that what can be shared over that protocol now includes things like a Merkel tree inclusion proof. So the protocol doesn't need to change, but there would need to be specification on the presenter and the issuer side for what the structure is of a Merkel tree inclusion proof, how to process how to reconstruct it and recomputee it, that sort of thing.
Dave Longley: Yeah, that's right. It mean internal to the crypto suite or if we make it generalized in some way to data integrity. Wesley Smith:
Wesley_Smith: Okay, cool. Thanks.
Greg_Bernstein: On that note,…
Greg_Bernstein: Wesley, when we started with selected disclosure, we had to carry more information about the proof to set up the proof structure. And so we did that with some seabore encoding. Once we did that, we had lots of hooks for it established the hooks we needed for BBS and the shot the salted hash approach. It also gives us hooks for options if we wanted to add feature options like these extra types of proofs. So that's where that kind of comes from.
Greg_Bernstein: I don't know if it gets small enough for use with barcode work because you're adding in more structure. Monu …
BBS Specification Progress at IETF
Manu_Sporny: Yeah, I wanted to get back to the comment, Greg, that you made about BBS being stuck again at ITF. is it administrative and would it be possible to put you as an author on that document to get it to move forward? It feels like we're just stuck in administrative hell in ITF.
Greg_Bernstein: I would love to say it was administrative health.
Greg_Bernstein: is the core author's lack of the IETF is driven by the authors, not the working group. So, it's harder than when we took over the W3CBS spec where the authors had kind of just abandoned things and we said, so I guess I could drop a note to the chairs. you are
Manu_Sporny: It would not just be you dropping a note to the chairs. It would be the verifiable if we can have a discussion about this tomorrow in the verifiable credential working group. it would be the entire working group or at least a good chunk of it saying we need the ITF spec to move forward. it is clear that the current set of authors are not progressing it at the rate that we need it to move.
Manu_Sporny: We are requesting as the W3C working group for Greg to be put in place as an author on that specification to continue to move the document through the W3C process.
Manu_Sporny: Because it's been like months of you waiting on the current authors to do something. I think we need to empower you to
Greg_Bernstein: Yes. and…
Greg_Bernstein: and we've got cryptographic help because I mean my European partners like Anna Layman at the HPI Institute they just told me that ISO is going to start back up with BBS but I don't know if the ISO is going to be pointing ISO had to wait because BBS got updated based on a paper in 2020
Greg_Bernstein: 23 from our friends up at the University of Washington. and so that's the basis of the current BBS as far as the proofs and such. O I guess that's something you have to wait three years but I don't know if ISO is going to still be pointing to the IETF document too, but that's what I heard from the last thing I heard from our European people.
Greg_Bernstein: But I could ask them to check in with you even.
Manu_Sporny: …
Manu_Sporny: let's I suppose neither here nor…
Greg_Bernstein: I hate us.
Manu_Sporny: there. …
Greg_Bernstein: Yeah, I know.
Manu_Sporny: they're going to do their thing. I don't think we need to worry about it.
Greg_Bernstein: Worry about it. Okay. Manu Sporny:
Manu_Sporny: If they use the ITF spec, great. I think we need to worry about the specs that we have on our docket and this is one of them in the IETF. the current set of authors are enabling us to proceed.
Greg_Bernstein: Yeah, they just kind of abandoned things. Yeah.
Manu_Sporny: So this is an official working group request to have you Greg added as an author so that you can shepherd that document through the rest of the process with support from Anna and her team and Anna Lassinskia and we have plenty of cryptographic the problem is the authors and so we need to make an official request so that we can start making progress again. so I'm suggesting that as a proposal in this group and then I'm suggesting we come to some kind of consensus today so that we can take that into the main call on Wednesday.
Manu_Sporny: That's it.
Greg_Bernstein: I am perfectly happy with that…
Greg_Bernstein: because like I said, we've had the cryptographic experts on our side wanting this to happen and so it's an editorial thing. it's finishing the editorials and the knits, cleaning up the knits. I mean, some of those may be cryptographic nets, but that's what the working group, the CFRG is good at pointing those out. So, it's just editial Ivonne, sorry, I'm turning it back over to Wes, but Ivonne, go ahead.
Ivan_Herman: I just wonder whether it helps to do it via W3C leaison. I don't know the IETF word really. So I'm just airing an idea because involving Philip who is as far as I know these days the official leazison to IATF as an organization might help or might not help. I have no idea but it may be possible to talk to Philillip either in the coming weeks or…
Ivan_Herman: at the most at TPAC which is not that far away and see whether something can happen with his help.
Greg_Bernstein: Who is this person?
Greg_Bernstein: There's a lot of different Philipses.
Ivan_Herman: Philip is a team member and he is the official le liazison to IATF for as from W3C.
Greg_Bernstein: On it.
Manu_Sporny: Yeah, plus one. He's way up in management. I think these are two separable things. Avon, one of them is getting the consensus of the group that we want somebody to ask or we want the request to be made and…
Ivan_Herman: Yeah. Yeah,…
Manu_Sporny: the second one is to get to do the outreach. Plus one von to what you said. I think that would be great and provide even more weight to the request.
Ivan_Herman: that's what I thought. Yeah. Okay.
Manu_Sporny: Plus one to that. But we want to do this in this group, an explicit yes,…
Ivan_Herman: True.
Manu_Sporny: we want to do this and then send that to BCWG, get it down as a proposal and resolution tomorrow and…
Manu_Sporny: then ask PL to execute if possible.
Ivan_Herman: Yeah, I don't know…
Greg_Bernstein: To tell you…
Ivan_Herman: if Philip Simona these days the ITF person one of the two but anyway
Greg_Bernstein: how extreme this has gotten, the core BBS draft
Greg_Bernstein: is two months expired now while the blind BBS draft and the BBS pseudonyms which I am co-author on are current and so it's like how can you have the followon drafts go forward when the core is but I can't touch the gore so I have brought this up a number of times with at least one of the core authors, but they keep I'm gonna get to it, but they're not. Okay, back over to Wesley.
Wesley_Smith: All right, sounds good. so other specifications of course ving status list BC barcodes and BC forgery defense. is there anything on any of those specifications folks want us to discuss today?
Wesley_Smith: Monu go ahead.
Manu_Sporny: Hold on. We need a poll and…
Wesley_Smith: Okay.
Manu_Sporny: we need people on this call to plus one if we are in agreement. We need to take that into the call tomorrow to move on this. So Wednesday,…
Ivan_Herman: on a Wednesday,…
Ivan_Herman: not tomorrow.
Manu_Sporny: So the poll would be request that the IETF CFRG add Greg Bernstein as an author. to core BBBS to move that document forward at the ITF.
Wesley_Smith: Okay. Poll request that the VC work group.
Manu_Sporny: I've typed it out, I can emote it right.
Wesley_Smith: Okay.
Manu_Sporny: So there Wes feel free to take over that thing.
Wesley_Smith: Yeah. Request the ITC and who is doing this request? The BCWG.
Manu_Sporny: Yes, the BCWG should request that
Wesley_Smith: All right.
Ivan_Herman: Come on.
Wesley_Smith: What does CFRG stand for?
Manu_Sporny: Cryptoform Research Group.
Wesley_Smith: 4 BBS can that be either a link to a specification or…
Greg_Bernstein: I'm getting you the link.
Manu_Sporny: Sorry, I didn't understand…
Wesley_Smith: core BBS?
Manu_Sporny: what you just said.
Wesley_Smith: What is core BBS?
Manu_Sporny: It's the core BBS specification.
Wesley_Smith: Is there a link to a document? You're right. I'm just trying to be rigorous about how this poll is. Thank you. and to move that document forward. I get okay.
Wesley_Smith: All please vote on the poll that has been added to chat.
Greg_Bernstein: How do…
Greg_Bernstein: how do we do that? Just plus one.
Wesley_Smith: Plus one zero minus one in chats.
Greg_Bernstein: And it's worse than I said. It expired in July 12th. It's like
Wesley_Smith: So that's not resolved. do we note that the poll has been widely supported in the minutes or…
Manu_Sporny: It's just a poll. it'll be obvious…
Wesley_Smith: something? Okay.
Manu_Sporny: because all those things will show up.
Wesley_Smith: All there seems to be clear consensus support for that concept in this task force. We will broach it with the working group on Wednesday. All right. Anything else on that topic?
Manu_Sporny: Thank you, Greg, for being willing to take up the authorship role in that doc as well.
Greg_Bernstein: It's like I've been Yes.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Anyone who shares a link to that,…
Greg_Bernstein: I'm a contributor listed on it. It's like I just finish it.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: it's better to share the one that Longly had which is in the poll than the one that Greg posted because it shows the history and the stall.
Greg_Bernstein: Yes. Yes. Tyranny's rule.
Wesley_Smith: Sounds like a win proposition to have you working on that document and…
Wesley_Smith: hopefully others see it that way as well.
Wesley_Smith: All right. So, we have about 15 minutes left today. is there any topic from Brian status list forger defense and BC barcodes that anybody particularly would like to cover today? Ivon, go ahead.
Bitstring Status List Publication
Ivan_Herman: I forgot to say as part of the announcement that the bitst string status list should be published the day after tomorrow no Thursday.
Wesley_Smith: Woohoo. I heard.
Ivan_Herman: Everything is done in there and Wesley I will have to set a new GitHub a secret to have a kid now working again for the time being it does not work
Wesley_Smith: Thank you. Kevin, go ahead.
Kevin_Dean: Yeah, just to say as the editor of the bitstring status list, I'm now just started making my way through the issues.
Kevin_Dean: I have cycles this weekend next to work on it.
Ivan_Herman: Keep
Kevin_Dean: So, we'll see some progress soon. Yep. Yeah.
Wesley_Smith: Great. I think add you to that document on the editor's list.
Wesley_Smith: The working group passed that a while back. I know here. Give me one second.
Kevin_Dean: I volunteered for it back in August and
Wesley_Smith: I'm missing a space in there. That might not work. that updates the editors. I noted that Dave Longley should be readded to that document now that we have support for this former structure. I will also note that Kevin Dean should also be added. Kevin, what's your GitHub handle?
Kevin_Dean: A 18- Dolphin. deal. Yep.
Wesley_Smith: Thank Also, and you were added for the V1.1 of the specification, Not earlier.
Kevin_Dean: Yep. Correct.
Wesley_Smith: All right, Von, go ahead.
Ivan_Herman: Just be careful if any PRs that are out there should stay PR between now and the update of Akidna the new GitHub.
Ivan_Herman: So don't do a merge…
Wesley_Smith: Sounds good.
Kevin_Dean: Duly noted.
Ivan_Herman: because God knows what will happen.
Kevin_Dean: Thank you.
Wesley_Smith: only one way to find out.
VC Barcodes Internationalization Review
Forgery Defense Status
Wesley_Smith: How exciting. All right. I think that is good on that particular topic. what else have we got? the VC barcodes internationalization review came in which is good. I didn't look super closely but it appeared to be not large in scope just kind of the things you'd expect them to want us to improve. So that's a good piece of progress. there are no open PRs on forgery defense. wow. We're in pretty good shape. We could take the last 10 minutes of this call and do some issue processing and triage, I suppose.
Wesley_Smith: So, need to pull up I'm going to say let's take the last 10 minutes and take a look at the internationalization review from BC barcodes. I think that would be a worthwhile way to spend a few minutes of the call. so there are Can I subtopic multiple issues? Is that a thing I can do or is that crazy talk?
Wesley_Smith: I'm hearing nothing.
Wesley_Smith: So, I'm going to try messy minutes.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: You can do it.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: It'll just make them minutes messy and probably it will not post the talking to those issues. But we don't do that So that's fine.
Wesley_Smith: All right. So, internationalization raised three issues. Number 71. First is references to the new line character should use internationalization standard character reference In this case, since new line is an invisible character, it should use the image version of The image can be obtained from spec. I don't fully understand the details there, but I certainly understand the general desire of the issue.
Wesley_Smith: For clarity on what we mean when we talk about a new lion character, I'll have to look into what they mean by this image version of the number 72, VCB example and nonasky. The example of creating a barcode uses the data from the driver's license. All the data encoded in the license is ASI. Specification does require UTF8 for non-ASKI string values, but none are shown anywhere. Some countries,…
Wesley_Smith: regions, languages do not desire a flattening to such a restrictive set of characters. Can the example show at least one non-asky value? Or failing that, can there be a reminder somewhere in the example that UTF8 is required? Yeah, I don't see…
Ivan_Herman: Yeah, that's a good point.
Wesley_Smith: I don't see why we couldn't have such an example in the example,…
Ivan_Herman: The ideal would be to have it in the picture as well, but it comes back to your remark about the image being up to date or…
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: Excuse me.
Ivan_Herman: The only problem I see is that at least the driving license is very much an American model.
Wesley_Smith: A bit what?
Ivan_Herman: So combining with god knows Hebrew characters becomes a bit awkward. art.
Wesley_Smith: Yeah, I mean yes and no. I think there are in these driver's license kind of key value structures, there are sort of discretionary substructures that can be used for whatever the issuing organization wants. So in an example, I don't see any reason why we couldn't find a way to include a non well I'll have to think about a little bit more what the cleanest way to do this would be.
Ivan_Herman: right?
Wesley_Smith: We would want the example to be actually useful. so for example, we wouldn't get a lot of use of including a non-asky character that wasn't digitally signed over. but again, I'll have to think of a way to make this useful. Mon, go ahead.
Manu_Sporny: I think there multiple kind of serializations that we have to care about. One of them is the standard code BCB and CoreLDD thing which is fine. That's UTFA full support for all the things. I think we're okay there. I think the challenge comes in when we're talking about any kind of ISO or based structure. I don't remember what the encoding character set is there. and I don't know how much it differs from the internationalized character sets like for example, Norwegian, governmentissued identification card.
Manu_Sporny: And so I hate to say it but we may want to take a look at that understanding that it may take several hours to track that down understand what's possible there because we do want it to be globally useful. another way to go about it is to just say it's a series of I don't know if we can say that. I was going to say it's just a series of bites,…
Wesley_Smith: Ivon, go ahead.
Manu_Sporny: but I don't know, if I forget exactly what we do for the canonicalization thing and if it's as simple as that.
Ivan_Herman: The Norwegian example just gave me a question. I don't know what the US setup is. If someone comes in from let's say Iceland where they have characters as part of the language which are not esy characters and if somebody's name carries that what happens in the US is he or…
Ivan_Herman: she forced to turn it into ASI or you could put that name there with these funny characters which are not esy characters in Iceland that maybe If this works,…
Wesley_Smith: Go ahead, Ted.
Ivan_Herman: that may be the simplest thing to do.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: This is going to vary.
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: The US does not have one driver's license issuer. There's one per state, I believe, and there's probably one per territory, although that I'm not sure as for special characters, I'm betting that's also going to be I know that it has been region specific to how they handle people who have multiple last names particularly without hyphens also hyphenated names also names of large numbers of characters which vary depending on the region how large is too large they truncate in in other places they wrap around to the next line it's a real mess and…
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: this is partly because hey the programmers for the states also believe the things that programmers believe that are wrong.
Ivan_Herman: Yeah, but our driving licenses in the example are in a non-existing state called utopia.
Ivan_Herman: Which is largely US image inspired but there we can be as liberal as possible. just leave it out there for West as an alternative
Ted_Thibodeau_Jr: I suppose
Wesley_Smith: Understood. I have been poking through the AMA standard document for Ricard designs. I believe their requirement is asky characters in data items. Although there are values that it will appear in Anvil compliant barcodes that are not ASKI values.
Wesley_Smith: Yeah, I need to look into it more. I'm not sure. Elaine, go ahead.
Elaine_Wooton: Yeah. So the states,…
Elaine_Wooton: some of the states in particular kind of take the AMVA standard as a suggestion. So it might be useful to say something like to the extent that a state or…
Wesley_Smith: All right.
Elaine_Wooton: a jurisdiction follows a standard some of them just don't. Just saying.
Wesley_Smith: We are running low on time. Phil, I see you commented. UTF8 MDLs are structured using Seabor. All text in strings are strictly required to be UTF8 encoded.
Wesley_Smith: internationalization support for special characters. All right. Thanks for the pointer there, Phil. We're about out of time for today.
Ivan_Herman: Bye-bye.
Wesley_Smith: I think this is a topic that will need some future discussion and some thought put into it. thank you all for the discussion today. and we have a couple things to talk about with the larger group on the call on Wednesday. appreciate the time and see you folks soon.
Greg_Bernstein: Bye.
Elaine_Wooton: Hi. Meeting ended after 00:54:44 👋 This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created.