Once upon a time (in August of '15, to be exact) I wrote a very simple versionatron called 'V'.

Edit: See also Ben Vulpes's excellent introduction to V.

V is a carefully-designed poison against the scurrying little vermin who feed on the proverbial 'fear, uncertainty, and doubt.'

For readers who are not in the little circle of folks who regularly use the thing, I will outline the - very simple - idea: you diff two texts (source code trees, generic human-readables, or whatever cocktail of the two you happen to have) using a mildly-enhanced GNU Diff, sign the output with your PGP key, and publish it. After this is done, people in your WoT will be able to correctly (in logical order!) apply the patch(-es) - and perform a handful of other useful operations - at their leisure. ¹

In exchange for a certain amount of headache - and a willingness to endure a bit of Spartan cruelty - V buys you version control with absolute cryptographic provenance of every delta, fully stateless operation (nothing you do will affect the output of a future operation unless you explicitly move files), a total extermination of the familiar "hidden file" shit-soup placed in directories by, e.g., GIT and SVN, and - most importantly - simplicity, via an absolute minimum of moving parts. V fits-in-head.²

Now this kind of thing is certainly not for everyone. But some thinking folks found it to have interesting implications; others - created some very spiffy applications; yet others - expertly re-implemented 'V', to the point where it is almost fit to be thought of as an actual tool.

Half a year later, the thing is in active use by perhaps a dozen people. The one worrisome thing is that most extant V-patches still carry only one known (or, at best, two/three) signatures - seals. Partly this is because people are lazyoverworked. But this is not the whole of it. There is also the fact that the act of producing a V-seal seems to have the connotation of wholesale acceptance, or endorsement, of the payload, and this is quite often The Wrong Thing. Not only are there times when one would like to seal a payload with a caveat of one kind or another, but presently we have no means of conveying disapproval - other than by refraining from sealing. The latter act conveys very little useful information, and no permanent sealed record remains of the effort taken to actually understand the patch. This is a Bad Thing.

One solution that has been floated is the inclusion of human-readable annotations with every seal. And this is well and good, and probably ought to happen, but perhaps it is possible to go a step further!

I would like to seal objects in a way which machine-readably conveys disapproval, doubtful provenance, doubtful veracity, and related attributes. And, naturally this has nowhere to go in classical PGP, and so what I propose here is, for the moment, a mere gedankenexperiment.

The root of the original problem is that a PGP signature per se conveys a scalar - precisely one bit of information: the existence of that signature. But what if it likewise carried a vector ? Can we meaningfully decompose it into orthogonal dimensions ? Let's say, of four 2-bit components, vaguely inspired by the familiar Unix file access permission scheme:

... adding up to precisely one byte of information conveying belief regarding the payload. This might seem like claptrap until you realize that this seal vector is able to usefully describe a wide variety of objects, of the kind one might seal:

Listed in no particular order, and not necessarily of the V-tronic variety. Decoding is left as an exercise for the alert reader! To possibly be continued...