@coderanger @malwareminigun All we can *ever* hope to do is make the attacker's job harder. Right now we can tell people "Hey, you should vet new contributors to your projects" and they'd (correctly!) ask "How should I vet them?". I think a web of trust could be one part of "how you vet people".

In my mind we're talking about two "problems" right now:
1) As a group, we're still assuming good intentions of Internet strangers and that's no longer warranted
2) We don't have good tools for *easily* visualizing relationships, so it's annoying to try and vet newcomers to a project

A web of trust doesn't solve (1), but I think it could be a part of (2).