Sloppy's Journal: Some interesting graphs

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a robot; someone had uploaded their signaure for my pgp key to biglumber's key exchange escrow service. That's not terribly unusual, but it raised the question, "who is this guy?" It was someone I had never met, who shouldn't have been signing my key. I emailed him and explained that I couldn't sign him back, unless we met and I checked his id and got his fingerprint from him in person. (And I want to meet him, to "correct" his behavior, but be as diplomatic and nicely encouraging as possible -- overall I'm glad a newbie dived in. We just need to get his signing standards up a bit.) Fortunately he's a fellow Albuquerquean so meeting was perfectly viable, and I got the idea to call a general meeting in Albuquerque so I could get someone else I had missed, as well as start the newbie off with several good connections. The upshot of all this, is that I had a keysigning meeting yesterday.

Unfortunately the newbie who started this, didn't show up. But fortunately, I'm now just two hops away from my hero, PRZ. ;-)

Anyway, after uploading a few new sigs to the keyservers, I started surfing around and found some keyring analysis websites that I hadn't been previously aware of. Henk Penning's site has some good tools for tracing paths through the WoT, and also showed me some one-way links from my key, indicating that some people I signed, never uploaded my sig to the keyservers. But best of all, it linked to Thomas Butter's website which has some graphs.

There's the MSD graph of my key, for example, which shows drops of my MSD (average distance to other keys in the strong set) a couple weeks after each keysigning meeting, and one mysterious drop that I suspect is caused by someone near me (?) having a particularly good meeting. It's fun to try to track down what happened. The ranking graph is interesting too. It has drops that correspond to the MSD dropping, but combined with an overall trend of my ranking to get worse. As time goes by, everyone else's keys are getting closer together, so whenever you just sit there and don't do anything, your relative closeness tends to drop. Neat.

(Oh, BTW, about the weird glitchy-looking thing on the MSD and ranking graphs, showing some spikiness around June 2004 -- it looks like everyone's graphs show this spike. I think something weird happened with the keyservers back then.)

([Update] Oh, and there's another "bump" in my graphs in June 2005. I finally figured this out -- it's from a friend's key expiring. So my rank and MSD suddenly get worse, but then they get better again a few weeks later, apparently due to this keysigning meeting.)

But the surfing went on, and I totally hit the jackpot. Behold Jörgen Cederlöf's brilliant Dissecting the Leaf of Trust. This thing is just full of interesting things, showing how if you look at a chaotic graph (I mean the Wot, not the pictures) the right way, then you can find consistent trends. Check out the "German double cross" (I don't know what else to call it, but that seems like a nifty name) and the top-level domain sorting.