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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

In the future, we might have some crypto based web of trust that prevents this.

Every page will be signed by a key and our browser will show the popularity and karma of that key.

The popularity and karma of a key will probably be readable on a blockchain, similar to the account balance of a Bitcoin address.

If one was to download a popular software and then sees the website is not signed by a popular key, they would double check if they are on the right site.

Karma will probably be a customized value. Counting the opinions of my friends over the opinions of my friends friends etc.

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What's the difference between what you propose and the (PGP) web of trust?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

It is related but not the same.

WOT: "The owner of this key is Joe Doe as confirmed by Susi Dusi and Lars Lampert".

What I mean: "The ownder of this key has a popularity of 23 (as can be seen on chain) and a karma of 75 (as calculated from my personal social graph or interests and on chain data)".

Looking at a Bitcoin address you can see that the owner of that address owns at least X bitcoin. But you don't know who he is. This is what I propose for popularity and karma.

I see. Though you still need a way to prevent rogue actors exploiting or gaming the system. The popularity (on chain) has no meaning if it's trivial to grow it (see google's page rank), or if it's not transparent where it's coming from (for example I would not trust a bitcoin address if I knew its inputs are coming from criminal activities).

Ransomware shops with plenty of affiliates should rank well on it

How does my grandmother translate this into "is this safe to click on"?

She doesn’t. You’d have to have a browser that programmatically utilizes the info to allow or deny the link.

I think it should go one step further - if Google determines a link is a Apple ID phishing link it just silently redirects it to Apple’s real ID login page. Anything that presents a barrier that you can apparently solve is going to be bypassed.

The largest providers could register their login page look and feel with the biggest browsers and nobody would be allowed to mimic them.

> The largest providers could register their login page look and feel with the biggest browsers and nobody would be allowed to mimic them.

Lol, amazon would in a heartbeat declare any page which has two input fields and a button as a 'login page' (regardless of the actual styling).

Or simply not having to download and install app from webpages and have a distribution system that is easier to monitor for suspicious activity like there is for linux distibutions.

On Windows there's the Windows Store, Chocolatey and Scoop. Of those three, Choco has the Brave browser.

Of course all three options fail to gain significant traction. The Windows Store tries to change the entire concept of a Windows application, while Choco and Scoop are command line applications targeted at IT admins.

And Microsoft’s winget now too?

Because the lack of options was the problem /s

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