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My apologies, I abuse "PKI" to mean "PK infrastructure" (which I know is what the acronym stands for, I'm making a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary), I think it's silly that PKI implicitly means CAs but according to Wikipedia at least, you're correct.

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No, he isn't, and the relevant Wikipedia article is very poorly written. PKI is a highly generic term. Webs of trust are just as much a PKI as a certificate-based system.

Everything you've said in this thread has been bang-on, and the replies you're getting are deeply depressing.

Can we at least agree that if we attempted a list of all the Xs a programmer needs to know before doing Y and made it law that nobody could write any software at all?

Understanding key pairs is very basic knowledge. I don't expect people to understand everything, but things like this, I do. It's dangerous not to.

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