I am not sure that I am the right person to ‘provide answers‘ to the questions James McGovern suggested that the Identity Gang folks should address. I think that the traffic on the list about nomenclature does not reflect the actual amount of activity on solutions going on in the community. There are several projects working away…not talking much on the list because they are solutions oriented people and have little patience for waxing on about the definition of ‘user-centric’. I will do what I can to help in the emergence of solutions and answers. I commit to continue to facilitate spaces where folks working towards real solutions can gather and work them out.
Identitification
RSA/SFO Identity Commons Dinner Dec 7th Please RSVP
Identity Commons/Gang Dinner Dec 7th
We are confirmed at Sauce for 7pm. We have a large table in their back room. Please come if you are in the Bay Area either for RSA or not.
RSVP on the wiki ASAP.
It is official…Identity Society Meeting London Feb 19.
This is going to be a great follow on to BarCamp London happening on the weekend. (you have to scroll down to see the wiki content)
Monday, February 19th, 2007
Venue: BT Tower Restaurant, 34th Floor, 60 Cleveland Street, London W1
You are cordially invited to the Inaugural Identity Society Open Space event.
This event is for anyone who is interested in identity and its relevance to society. If you wish to attend please proceed to the Registration page. Please also feel free to spread the word to others! The wiki for the event can be found at IdentitySociety.org
- 8:30 am registration with 9.00 start (with two breaks and a one-hour lunch)
- Welcome and Open Space orientation
- Key speakers describe the genesis of the Identity Society and identity Open Space collaboration experience to date
- A discussion of topics for the break out sessions (which has already started in the identity society mailing list)
- Concluding sessions will include one on “Organising the Identity Society”
- The end of the open space is for announcements—and a sharing of the Open Space experience.
- Closing at the BT Tower Venue 4.00pm
- Everyone is invited for evening drinks (and possibly some food)
Initial discussion proposes that the “Identity Society” is not necessarily primarily a talking shop for the ins and outs of “identity technologies”, but might take a broader remit—of identity’s relevance to society as a whole—how we express our unique identity as individuals and collectives freely, but how we also want the benefits of cooperation and collaboration. This is of course in a context within which technology would have a vital place..
However, what Identity Society becomes is very much still up for grabs, and is down to all of us to decide. Which is hopefully what the Feb 19th meeting will help us begin to do.
We look forward to your contribution, in person or through the wiki.
Identity Event Dates
Last week we had three great events. Liberty 2.0, VRM and Mobile Identity.
The Spring program of Identity events has settled out.
February 7th will be a Identity Commons/Gang Dinner during the Week of RSA and the Open Mobile Alliance.
February 19th the folks in the UK are having and Identity Society gathering in London. It will be done with Open Space.
April 16-17 we will be doing and Identity Open Space in collaboration with Liberty Alliance before their meeting in Brussels.
May 14-16 will be Internet Identity Workshop in Mountainview will be the main meeting place for Identity Commons working groups.
Identity MAGNET
I am heading over to the ITU-T Focus Group on Identity Management next month.
Lee Dryburgh is going to be there. I am looking forward to meeting him finally. We have been corresponding in IM for a while now. His talk follows mine at eTel.
He pointed to the MAGNET Project recently. I went there to check out what they are up to…
MAGNET – My personal Adaptive Global Network
MAGNET Beyond is a worldwide R&D project within Mobile and Wireless Systems and Platforms Beyond 3G. MAGNET Beyond will introduce new technologies, systems, and applications that are at the same time user-centric and secure. MAGNET Beyond will develop user-centric business model concepts for secure Personal Networks in multi-network, multi-device, and multi-user environments
MAGNET Beyond has 30 partners from 15 countries, among these Industrial Partners, Universities, and Research Centres.
Then I went deeper and found IST Projects listed with a cornucopia of creative acronyms and inspiring words. However what is less clear is what has happened to any of them in terms of actual technology and deployment that works for people.
Ambient Network
In the telecommunications world of future, there will be many different networks. To provide users with the services they want irrespective of their location, these networks have to cooperate. In a highly mobile environment, this network cooperation will have to be established ‘on the fly’. The Ambient Networks project is about making this fast network cooperation a reality.
Cruise NoE IST Project (CReating Ubiquitous Intelligent Sensing Environments)
The Network of Excellence (NoE) CRUISE intends to be a focal point in the planning and coordination of research on communication and application aspects of wireless sensor networking in Europe.
DAIDALOS – Designing Advanced network Interfaces for the Delivery and
Administration of Location independent, Optimised personal Services.
(((Doesn’t this sound like VRM)))
DAIDALOS is an EU Framework Programme 6 Integrated Project, currently in its second phase. Mobility has become a central aspect of the lives of European citizens in business, education, and leisure. The rapid technological and societal changes and the bewildering emergence of numerous new services has created a complex environment for network operators and a confusing situation for end users. The enhancement of existing technologies and development of new Beyond 3G systems will increase this complexity even more.
The End-to-End Reconfigurability (E2R) project aims at realising the full benefits of the diversity within the radio eco-space, composed of wide range of systems such as cellular, fixed, wireless local area and broadcast. The key objective of the E2R project is to devise, develop, trial and showcase architectural design of reconfigurable devices and supporting system functions to offer an extensive set of operational choices to the users, application and service providers, operators, and regulators in the context of heterogeneous systems. Innovative research, development and proof of concept are to be pursued from an end-to-end perspective, stretching from user device through all system levels.
e-SENSE VISION – e-SENSE enables capturing of Ambient Intelligence for Beyond 3G Mobile Communication Systems through Wireless Sensor Networks.
Ambient Intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the enabling technology that provides systems with information to allow for Ambient Intelligence has been neglected and currently consists of many independent modes of input, mainly relying on active user interactions or specialised sensor systems gathering information.
is a three year (2002-2005) European research project (IST-2001-34734), on self-organizing and collaborative energy-efficient sensor networks. It address the convergence of distributed information processing, wireless communications, and mobile computing.
The vision of ubiquitous computing requires the development of devices and technologies, which can be pervasive without being intrusive. The basic components of such a smart environment will be small nodes with sensing and wireless communications capabilities, able to organize flexibly into a network for data collection and delivery.
HIDENETS (HIghly DEpendable ip-based NETworks and Services) is a specific targeted research project funded by the European Union under the Information Society Sixth Framework Programme. The project was started in January 2006 and have a duration of 3 years.
The aim of HIDENETS is to develop and analyze end-to-end resilience solutions for distributed applications and mobility-aware services in ubiquitous communication scenarios. Technical solutions will be developed for applications with critical dependability requirements in the context of selected use-cases of ad-hoc car-to-car communication with infrastructure service support.
MIMOSA – “Microsystems platform for MObile Services and Applications”
Make Ambient Intelligence a reality by developing a mobile-phone centric open
technology platform
RUNES – Reconfigurable Ubiquitous Networked Embedded Systems
Embedded systems are now ubiquitous. They can be found in a diverse range of appliances, from mobile phones to smoke alarms, from refrigerators to trucks. Enabling these systems to communicate opens up new areas of applications: smart buildings, industrial automation, healthcare, power distribution and host of others. Some of the applications will result in a more efficient, accurate or cost effective solution than previous ones. Others will be new, previously unimagined or impossible. We are in the middle of a major technological revolution that will affect many aspects of our lives, and Europe is well placed to be at the forefront of exploiting this technology.
Moving to this exciting new technique in system development necessitates a common language for all systems. Without this, we risk repeatedly ‘re-inventing the wheel’ at a high cost in money and effort, and we compromise the inter-operability of sensors between applications.
Simplicity – Secure, Internet-able, Mobile Platforms LeadIng CItizens Toward simplicitY.
The development of new ICT devices and network-based services has generated a bewildering array of configuration procedures, access technologies and protocols. For non-technical users, excessive complexity is an obstacle to take-up of these new technologies.
The Simplicity project has developed and evaluated tools, techniques and architectures to remove this complexity, enabling users to customize devices and services with minimal effort.
WINNER – Wireless World Initiative New Radio
is a consortium of 41 partners co-ordinated by Siemens working towards enhancing the performance of mobile communication systems. The improvements of radio transmission to be explored by WINNER are crucial for enabling new mobile services and applications anytime and anywhere.
Our challenge is to make mobile communication systems more adaptable to user needs.
There were these other links out to other projects:
Wireless World Research Forum
WWI – World Wireless Initiative
MOCCA – Mobile Cooperation and Coordination Action
Information Society Technologies
ECMA “Standards at Internet Speed”
ESTI – “Home of ICT Standardization”
Looking ahead to Burning Man 2007
One of the personal highlights of last year was going to Burning Man with the Sustainabilaville Camp. The experience continues reverberate and deepen as I move about the world. I just got back from a big east coast trip and I went places that I never normally go because I don’t drive. The car based lifestyle that I witnessed going by on the highway and train tracks was kind of shocking to me. It brought into focus the strong contrast of Burning Man and the contrast of being in the desert and walking and biking around the playa.
I have been looking forward to going back to Burning Man this year since returning. On top of everything Burning Man was a very interesting ‘identity experience.’ I am going to be leading a camp based on model that my Seattle Sustainabilaville friends have perfected over several years. One of the reasons I am leading a camp is because I want to be supportive of members of the identity community being able to go. There is already one identity gang member signed up to go 🙂
I am currently working on getting together 10-15 people to be the founding organizational group. I hope to have it formed by the end of February.
The theme is the Green Man – one of my favorite archetypes – the masculine in relationship to nature a sort of a pair to the ‘mother earth’ archetype. So the Green Man is ‘manly’ and powerful yet has a deep connected relationship to the natural world. He “rises” in the spring and goes to rest in the winter.
Corporations plan to contribute Open Source OpenID
This was a great to see from James McGovern:
In terms of my own planned 2007 contributions to open source, I will be commiting to contributing to the authorization specification as part of the OpenID community. The funny thing is that I will be going against my better judgement in that enterprises tend to desire to contribute to things that are measurable like implemented software as we really can’t do anything with ideas alone. Ideas need to be turned into software. What I fear the most is folks from Sun such as Pat Patterson, Sara Gates,Simon Phipps, Robin Wilton, Don Bowen and folks from Microsoft such as Kim Cameron and Jason Matusow openly supporting initiatives such as OpenID but not taking deliberate steps within their respective employers to actually implement the OpenID specification and any resulting authorization enhancements. I too am somewhat constrained in that the perception of anything that isn’t implemented will be perceived as an academic exercise that was a waste of time that will put the ability to contribute to open source projects in the future at risk…
XFN, Liberty 2.0 and OpenID UX
Eran Sandler has two great posts about identity and OpenID. One links to my post on “the network of Me.” He asks if we can do ‘creative things’ with XFN and identities. I personally don’t want my identifier in anyone else’s XFN file. I want to be asked by the person if I want my relationship with them expressed in a new context. All our relationships do not exist in all contexts….there is however often a lot of overlap between people with whom we share multiple contexts – making these relationships traverse contexts in a privacy protecting and non-annoying way is the challenge. I hope that people interested in how identities, social graphs and social portability will go to the Free Liberty 2.0 meeting on January 22 to learn more about their proposed open standard for this.
He also blogs eloquently about the still emerging challenge of UI and OpenID adoption.
I keep on seeing two distinct ways that are common in such sites/services (at least in the sites that I’ve visited).
The first, is to separate the OpenID handling to a different page. In that page the process of sign-in/up is actually the same. If this is your first time of signing in with your OpenID it will actually transform itself to a sign-up process and may ask you a couple of questions and may interact with your OpenID provider.
The second, OpenID is integrated only in the Sign-In screen. If you sign in with an OpenID for the first time you will actually get a sign-up process and you may be asked a few questions and have an interaction with your OpenID provider.
The best place, of course, is to have OpenID in both the Sign-In and Up screens, if a user that do have an OpenID reaches any one of these screen the scenario of signing in for the first time (or not for the first time) will work no matter when he is.
What do you think? How would use design these processes that will still fit to your site/service and still support in a clear and obvious way OpenID?
There is an emerging community that is focused on User Experience. I hope that Eran and others who care about this join up. We need all the UX brains we can get on this not easy to solve puzzle.
Why i-names? I think they work for my people.
There is a follow up post here on how URL’s are cool.
It is no secret that I happen to like i-names. They are an open standard that I think has a lot of promise to help people have more control of their identifiers on the web. I will start out with a story and go on to a few practical reasons why.
I first ‘got into’ identity it was 2004 and I was helping spread the word about the upcoming Planetwork conference – where we were going to demo a really early clugy version of i-names doing SSO between 3 systems AND talk about the Identity Commons and how it could evolve. I got my first ever VOIP phone call from Owen who was in Greece and he sent me all their documentation to date- so I could write a summary for the brochure and website. (Over the holidays I went through papers and found the folder where I had printed out all that old stuff it was fun to reflect back and realize how much had changed since then. ) I wrote a great one page summary and they liked it a lot – it was the best conscious articulation about what they were doing they had seen. This was a year after that Augmented Social Network White Paper was published – I had read it and absorbed it throughly and wanted to ‘build’ that vision for my community.
I don’t just abstractly care about this stuff. I want people and communities that I care about to have identity services that meet their needs and make them more effective in the world. In 2002 I founded a project to build such networking tools – we actually did do two prototypes in Drupal by 2005. We were early to market and those folks were not ready for what we were offering (I may turn my attention back to serving this community in 2007).
There was no other user-centric identity anything except for the i-names guys and Identity Commons who were working closely together. I got along with everyone and enjoyed their spirit and energy. So I joined – I started working for Owen Davis evangelizing for the ‘first’ Identity Commons. I will admit looking back I was perhaps ‘overly’ enthusiastic and a bit naive about where the technology was. I was having a conversation with a friend in the community saying…”you know thinking about it if I had known what I know now I am not sure I would have done that job”. His response was well “that is why the young kids get things done – they don’t know better.” I think he is right on this. I also must say I have no regrets about the path I have taken the last three years. Indeed I think I have found myself and a place in the world that I really make a difference.
The user-centric identity community has really grown and flourished in the past 2 years. Thanks to the energy and support of Doc, Phil Windley, Phil Becker, Eric Norlin, Kim Cameron, Brett McDowell and many others. It has been exciting to watch it evolve.
Johannes has been particularly instrumental in bringing the ‘web based identifier’ user-centric crowd to convergence. Like all technical communities people come at things from different angles. He is a deep sceptic about anything new. He has been patient and listened to Drummond and the other XRI guys and has come to see some real value in what they are putting forward here are two posts one on XRI resolution and the other on XDI. Phil Windly also a thoughtful voice in the space has written about how he has come to understand their offering. This is a post about attending Andy Dale’s XDI workshop. His post about i-names at IIW starts out “Over the last few years, I’ve been impressed by a new Internet naming convention called XRI, or eXtensible Resource Identifiers”.
The convergence of LID, OpenID and XRI/inames into one thing called Yadis – to reduce end user confusion is a really great thing (of course Sxip joined the party later and this too reduced confusion even more and is also a good thing). I think the choice to not continue with the ‘Yadis brand’ and go back under the OpenID brand is a good thing…it is a much nicer brand. It also means that the people coming to this need to get that OpenID now includes these other ‘threads’ in the ‘web based identifier’ way of doing things for end-users. I think this diversity is good. If you don’t want to use i-names don’t but let the diversity flourish.
On a more practical level why do I like i-names?
I think i-names are easier to get for the marginally internet literate:
It may be news to folks but there are some internet users who don’t know how to scroll. There are not a whole lot of super literate users – we hang out with a lot of them in silicon valley but normal people….they are not like us. I think there are a bunch of bloggers who are going to ‘get’ that the URL they have for their blog is something they can use to login to other blogs to comment etc. That is cool. I think it is going to be the majority of OpenID users in the next year. I also really think that it is going to be a lot easier for regular folks to ‘get’ i-names.
Domain names system usabilty sucks:
I think that the domain name system and the tools for normal people to work in it are atrocious. I can hardly get things to work right and I am reasonably tech literate. I don’t know how to do domain mapping so that identitywoman.net is the URL that you see when you look at the top of my blog – rather then the http://www.kaliyasblogs.net that you see cause I can only figure out how to forward it. I can’t figure out for the life of my how to transfer domains from one registrar to another or merge the 4 accounts I have on one registrar into one. IT IS TOTALLY NOT USER FRIENDLY. Maybe by some miracle the UI and architecture can be changed – you know I am not betting on it.
i-names are less confusing then URL’s:
So lets go back to the community that I got started with trying to serve. They are very social people they come together at groovy conferences and go on retreats at spiritual places. They are web mail and Yahoo group users. They need systems and tools that are truly empowering and meet them where they are at with web-literacy. I think i-names have a better chance of doing this then URL’s. For starters they will have to ‘get a URL’ then use it a bunch of different places – each of those places will have URL’s for their profile in that system. People have multiple URL’s and clearly not all of them are OpenID enabled. I would rather just give them all community i-names then they clearly understand this new ‘thing’ (it is not a URL and not an e-mail address) is what they use to login different places and manage identity services from (like profile management when that happens).
I can upgrade and not loose my name:
I like the fact that I could start out with a community name like @integrativeactivism*morningglory and use that on several sites around the web and then….decide you know i want a top level name just for me … so I go and get =morningglory and all the logins that I have under that other community name don’t break. The i-number under @integrativeactivism*monrningglory is mine and can be resolved to =morningglory.
Group membership and micro-app ecology:
I also like i-names because from my understanding there is a way to assert group membership by the issuance of an identifier that one has control over. This gives you the potential weave together networks of applications for different communities that you are in. For example the solstice planning group could all have i-names @integrativeactivism*solsticeplanning*morningglory Then the wiki they went to to organize could be not on the same platform but work non-the-less for the people in that group. I really want to see an ecology of mico-apps that can be woven together and manage access control in ways that work for “simple people.”
Simple workable tools for personal link management:
The example from Phil’s blog explains a lot about how it is simple and I think it will work for the spiritual woman over 45 who are part of those communities that I care that these systems work for.
Lately I’ve started to feel like i-names and XRIs are coming into their own. Not long ago, for example, my i-name registry, 2idi, started offering XRI forwarding services. That means that I can create XRIs from my i-name that resolve to other things on the Net. For example:
http://xri.net/=windley/(+index) forwards to my “index” page on the Web.
http://xri.net/=windley/(+contact) is my contact page
http://xri.net/=windley/(+blog) resolves to my blog
http://xri.net/=windley/(+call) points to me on Skype (i.e. Firefox will launch a call to me through Skype if you click on this.)
http://xri.net/=windley/(+feed) forwards to my RSS feed
http://xri.net/=windley/(+photos) points to my online photo collection
What’s the point? Easy: I own =windley, my i-name, for the next 50 years and I control the resolution. If my blog URL or my Skype handle changes, I can change how those XRIs resolve and you can still find me and all the service related to me. Plus, the XRIs above are (mostly) based on a standard semantics, so if I know your i-name, I can easily find your blog.
XRIs are more complicated than URLs, but I remember everyone screwing up their face when URLs were new too and somehow we got used to them. XRIs make up for their additional complexity in semantic mappings and flexibility.
I must also chime in and say that I agree with Marc Canter
I’m also getting tired of waiting for ‘attribute sharing’ working.
I hope we can get this next layer of tools working relatively quickly now that we have the authentication layer stuff figured out. I am hopeful that the open standards for Datasharing that are getting traction now in the nonprofit community. I spent most of the last two weeks working organizing and writing up note cards of quotes from the vast repository of papers I have on the Open Social Network. I have an outline of a paper that I hope to have a working draft released in the next few months. As for my ‘enthusiasm’ I really want this vision to materialize and I am more committed then ever to reality based thinking and action so it can happen.
India is working on a National ID Card
Here are some excerpts from the Indian Express about the proposed scheme and pilot project.
From the IndianExpress:
National Identity Number to each citizen, and also features finger biometrics and a photograph of the individual. In other words, this is the definitive dossier on that particular citizen.
The objectives of the scheme are said to be enhancing internal security, and addressing illegal migration. The Citizenship Act, 1955, was amended and notified in 2003 to include a section on registration of citizens and issuing of identity cards.
The cards also involve the creation of a National Register of Indian Citizens, which will incorporate all the details and updates whenever crucial variables changed, eg when people got married, migrated or changed their name.
The actual implementation seems like it has been quite complex.
This was also at the bottom of the article
In Spain, Italy and Germany, it is compulsory for citizens over 16 years to carry I-cards.
In France, I-cards are voluntary.
In the UK, from 2010, all those over the age of 16 applying for a passport will have to have an I-card. Eye, facial scans and fingerprints will be added onto a National Register from 2008.
At present, the Republic of Ireland, Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania are the only EU countries to have no I-card schemes.
ID-Entity Bogey:
have encountered serious procedural and implementation problems, such as at Murshidabad, which failed to verify some 90 per cent of the population. Among them are some Iranian families living in Murshidabad for 70 years. The Indian authorities think they are Iranians and they should go back to Iran and the Iranian government believes them to be Indian.
For a nation that boasts of a population of more than a billion, not all them literate, not all of them possessing primary documents, and not all them settled in one location for generations, it doesn’t require a genius to guess that the survey, if it goes for a national roll-out, will encounter many Murshidabads.
You starts blogging!
Brad Topliff is sort of like me. A non-techie guy into user-centric identity, i-names, XDI and how cool they could be. He works at ooTao with Andy Dale. He has started blogging in part because he was named person of the year. The blog is called – “Who Are You?.” His second post is about how cool i-names are and where they fit into things.
i-names work in OpenID logins too
It should be noted to all of you coming from O’Reilly’s radar. That OpenID (the latest version) does accept i-names and identityprovider URL’s (this is the Sxip way of identity provision).
One of the reasons that i-names are cool is that they have persistence in a way that URLs have some challenges with in the long run. The names can be transfered to a new person but the i-number underneath is not. If you have domain name you are using as your identifier and you don’t renew it. The new owner of the URL can use it to sign-in to places you have had accounts.
i-names also have a nicer syntax and hopefully work for the internet users who may never get they can use URL’s to login.
I did it! SSO is really here and some cool identity links
I of all people should have done this before but I was waiting for OpenID 2.0 to be out there and working so I could use my i-name. I went to Ma.gnolia today and it just worked. They have a great way to integrate an OpenID with an existing account. I hope that I can pull over my delicious bookmarks. I joined the Identity 2.0 bookmark group.
I found some interesting sites
Wikidentity is a Flash client that shows you any hCards in a page you are browsing, and allows you to search for hCards that other users have helped index. You can also export hCards that you’ve discovered to use in a variety of applications, such as Address Book.
hCards are nice but I am not about to post mine on the web for anyone to scrape.
Unit Structures latest recommendation to Social Network Designers:
In the past, I’ve done a good deal of writing explaining how to design better and more relevant SNS. Today I offer designers of social network sites my single most valuable piece of advice: Adopt OpenID.
The walled gardens will stay with us, but walled gardens in social network sites need to be a thing of the past. Imagine the pitch – you can add friends from any OpenID network to your SNS. This has huge, democratic possibilities. This feels natural for SNS – walled gardens don’t. If you’d like to find out more about OpenID, you can refer to this primer I wrote about it on the ClaimID blog, or you can email me and I can help put you in touch with folks who will be able to help you. Once you grasp OpenID, and see how naturally it works with SNS, you’ll see what a valuable direction it is to take your product.
OpenID is coming – the tipping point grows closer each day. This is a tremendous opportunity – and I do hope you’ll consider it seriously. This is the way of the future.
The thing I don’t like so far is that it doesn’t make recommendations the way Delicious does. Maybe this is a forthcoming feature.
I found this article by David Kerns on reputation and trust that points to Clippinger’s blog. He has not posted since 2005. According to the social physics site he has a book coming out next year. Interesting. I wonder if Doc can convince him that blogging ideas and parts of the book and sharing with them the community might be a good idea. It seems that if markets are conversations books certainly are. As Kim learned with the Laws of Identity getting community input was a good idea for everyone.
The importance of Annonymity being baked into our systems is highlighted by Ben Laurie:
Firstly, when I say anonymity should be the substrate I am not just talking about the behaviour of identity management systems, I also mean that the network itself must support anonymity. For example, currently, wherever you go you reveal your IP address. Any information you give away can be correlated via that address. People sometimes argue that this isn’t true where you have a dynamic address, but in practice that isn’t the case: most dynamic addresses change rarely, if ever – certainly they tend not to change unless you go offline, and the rise of always-on broadband makes this increasingly unusual. Even if the address does change occasionally, you only need to reveal enough information in the two sessions to link them together and then you are back to being correlated again.
Secondly, people seem to think that privacy is an adeqaute substitute for anonymity. I don’t believe this: privacy is all about voluntarily not linking stuff you could link. Anonymity is about making such linking impossible. Microsoft’s Cardspace claims to provide anonymity where, in fact, it is providing privacy. Stefan Brands comes close with his selective disclosure certificates, but they are still linkable, sadly. These systems only provide privacy if people agree to not make the links they could make. Anonymity provides privacy regardless of people’s attempts to undermine it. That’s why you need to have anonymity as your bottom layer, on which you build whatever level of privacy you can sustain; remember that until physical onion routing becomes commonplace you give the game away as soon as you order physical goods online, and there are many other ways to make yourself linkable.
I do sense that this is not being thought about enough. I hope that Stefan can participate more actively in the community so that we will address it more fully.
I found this post by Bokardo a social web designer. He has a post on Domain as Identity and the services behind it. I totally agree and I can’t wait for him and others to discover the cool things they can do with XRI and XRDS. The TOTH (Thrill of the Hack) experimentation has just begun 🙂
I would encourage you guys to join Ma.gnonlia – for two reasons one it is OpenID2 enabled AND it has cool group bookmark sharing features.
UX and OpenID the hickups are beginning
The weather that Tom brings us on OpenID is mixed but good in the long run. He says that community is what counts 🙂
Here’s what I learned enabling the sites with OpenID:The Good: OpenID registration is a beautiful thing. The legacy registration page on Stuffopolis can be scrapped. Once that happens, validating email addresses, requiring passwords and lost password security questions for new members will be forever outsourced to the OpenID providers (those that your website trusts).
The Bad: When introducing OpenID, it is a breeze for new members coming to the site, but it can be a little confusing for existing members who registered with the legacy credentials. When those existing members find out about the OpenID option, instead of logging in with the legacy credentials to add the OpenID to their account, they often log in with their new OpenID instead. This log-in will attempt to create a new account by fetching simple registration data from their identity provider. If their email address (sent by their identity provider) matches the one already registered with their legacy account, they can be given some instructions, but sometimes it doesn’t match and now we have a problem because if they go back and log in with the legacy credentials, they can’t associate their new OpenID to it because another account (the one they accidentally created) now has that OpenID.
Update 12/17: What I need to do is when a member goes to his profile page and attempts to modify his OpenID, after a successful OpenID authentication, if the site detects that there is another account with the same OpenID, then the site will ask the member to confirm that he wants the other account deleted, making sure there is only one account with that OpenID.
The Ugly: Now that some popular open source packages (wordpress, mediawiki, phpBB) support OpenID, the software should honor each other’s OpenID sessions so that someone who logs into mediawiki with his OpenID doesn’t get presented with an OpenID login form when he visits phpBB, for instance. Although this isn’t a huge problem, it is a little ugly and it seems it will require a standard way of registering OpenID apps on a system so that an OpenID session state change in one app will inform the others.
In a nutshell: OpenID is still immature, but it has an extraordinarily committed community behind it and when it comes to software, that’s what counts.
DIDW Identity Predictions 2007
They have just compiled their list of 10 predictions for the coming year. Two of them have to do with user-centric stuff.
3. URL-based identity begins a cycle of real adoption in the blogosphere and alpha geek communities.
URL-based identity overcame many technical and interoperability hurdles in 2006, and got key buy-in from developing communities. 2007 will see the early incarnations of this technology begin a cycle of significant and real adoption in the blogosphere and alpha geek worlds.
8. An acquisition will occur in the “user-centric” identity space.
This is our “stretch” prediction for the year. Our sense of the user-centric space is that its about to grow enough to foster an acquisition of one of its players. Nothing you-tube-ish, mind you, but a move that will signal the real “birth” of the user-centric identity marketplace.
I hope that the adoption goes beyond blogosphere and alpha geeks and by the end of 2007 is reaching regular folks. As for the other one I wonder who will be acquired. Any predictions?
Kids and Identity – National Registry
The Feds have some plan to photograph every kid in the United States a company called Lifetouch is doing it/going to do it. It is all based on the premise that kids go missing and they need good photos for the rescue efforts. Parents are issued a card for each of their children that they can let law enforcement access if they give permission. From the Article:
What is Lifetouch? The privately held company photographs over 24 million North American schoolchildren each fall, making it the market leader. It also takes pictures of millions of other people through J.C. Penney, Target and Flash Digital Portraits studios.
Lifetouch would enlist partner schools that would allow it to distribute to each student a set of wallet cards that include a unique retrieval code and crisis hot-line number for the center.
Lifetouch would provide round-the-clock staff for the center’s hot line. If a child went missing, parents could call the hot line with the code.
The center would authenticate the case and the parents’ consent with law enforcement and then contact Lifetouch with the image-retrieval code.
Lifetouch would immediately transmit to the center the image of the child, faster than many parents could get a high-quality, usable image to the center.
The center could then broadcast the image through Amber alerts, its Web site, posters and mail inserts.
“Getting the picture is extremely valuable” to the search process, Bob O’Brien, senior director of the Missing Children Division at the center, told me. He explained that one in six recovered children is found as a result of a poster, “and many parents are challenged finding a quality picture of their kids to use for the poster.”
Since the launch, Lifetouch has spent more than $2 million to keep the program running and has assisted in more than 400 searches. Lifetouch images directly led to the recovery of seven children, O’Brien said.
I am really not sure how I feel about this. It feels a bit to big brothery to me.
Identity ironies…
I was born 1 hour north of the US boarder in Vancouver, Canada. Brian Hamlin my lovely husband a native Californian.
I came to the United States in 1995 on a student visa meaning I have had over 10 years of first hand ‘user-experience’ with this identity stuff in relationship to government.
I have had a temporary permanent status for 2 years now (think about that oxymoron for a bit). It expires Dec 16. I put in my application to have this temporaryness removed in early November.
Last week I got a note in the mail that my ‘temporary status’ had been extended a year and looked up how much time it would take for them to actually process my application (6 months) and that I would have another notice in the mail shortly telling me when to go in to get my biometrics taken.
The notice came on Monday in the mail and had my biometric taking appointment time as 9AM on 12/05/2006 – that would be the Tuesday Morning of the IIW. Needless to say I sent it back and asked it to be rescheduled.
Here is the text of the notice:
To process your application the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Service (USCIS) must capture your biometrics. PLEASE APPEAR AT THE BELOW APPLICATION SUPPORT CENTER AT TEH DATE AND TIME SPECIFIED. IF YOU FAIL TO APPEAR AS SCHEDULED, YOUR APPLICATION WILL BE CONSIDERED ABANDONED.
Application support center: USCIS Oakland, 2040 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, CA, 94612.
PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE NOTICE CAREFULLY
DATE ADN TIME OF APPOINTMENT
12/05/2006
9:00AM
WHEN YOU GO TO THE APPLICATION CENTER TO HAVE YOUR BIOMETRICS TAKEN, YOU MUST BRING:
1. THIS APPOINTMENT NOICE and
2. PHOTO IDENTIFICATION. Naturalization applicants must bring their Alien Registration Card. All other applicants must bring a passport, driver’s license, national ID, military ID, or State-issued photo ID. If you appear without proper identification, your biometrics may not be taken.
CELL PHONES, CAMERAS, OR OTHER RECORDING DEVICES ARE NOT PERMITTED.
REQUEST FOR RESCHEDULING
Pleas resdhedule my appointment for the next available: ( ) Wednesday afternoon ( ) Saturday Afternoon.
Identity Man?
I am not sure what Craig Burton intends by pointing to this video and saying it is ‘identity man’ charging towards the identity big bang. perhaps he can explain more.
What is a Barrier to Entry – OpenID
This comment was posted by Vivek Puri at the bottom of Ramana’s post (quoted above).
OpenID is great idea, but adds another layer of complexity for early adopters. This might not go down well with the startups who can end up loosing important initial users. Also bigger companies like Google will offer Single Sign-on only for their own apps which becomes another point of disconnect. In my case I use Writely for document editing, Editgrid for spreadsheet, and del.icio.us for bookmarks which is a pain to manage.
As for offline usage, that is a very much required feature. Especially Writely should be able to implement that part easily since they have already cracked the algorithm for multi-user data edit and sync. Groove networks does offer that feature but is not for individual.
I guess there is some miscommunication in what OpenID is and how it actually lowers the barrier to entry to try new Office 2.0 applications.
This is how I see it.
I have my blog URL that is openID enabled or I have an i-name. I now can go to any one of the new groovy Office 2.0 applications and instead of getting yet another login and password. I just use my OpenID. I don’t have to put it into that spreadsheet of all my names and passwords or just use the same one I use everywhere that is totally insecure. Instead I bring my identity to the site. I save time. If I am an early adopter type I will likely get an OpenID relatively quickly and it will be a handy fast way for me to try these things out. Of course Office 2.0 applications should not force people to have OpenID’s those who want yet another user name and password can have one.
I know personally I avoide signing up for anything new that requires yet another login. I would be more inclined to tryout an Office 2.0 application that has OpenID as a login option.
I think all these office 2.0 copmanies can collectively compete with the big silo’s by offering SSO amongst themselves.
More Slashdot Stories of interest.
So it seems slashdot is full of interesting identity related stories this week.
We have the ‘spying into laptops when you cross the boarder’ story from the NYTimes. (any container is searchable this means your hard disk on your lap top [I suppose avoiding this search is one of the advantages to storing information in the cloud]) It also speaks to the need for technology folks to get more involved in shaping the law.
You can blog in China with a pseudonym but only if you register using your ‘real name’
How we organize ourselves to do work together – are worker owned co-ops an alternative to the corporate form for successful open source development.
Ponderings on the Metaverse as the next big thing. It is an area that I think we in the identity community need to become more literate in because some of the legal, social and economic issues they are tackling are the same ones we are.
Election Mashups on google Earth.
Regaining one’s voice after loosing it the story of Scott Adams, Dilbert’s Writer.
Identity stories from Slashdot
Yesturday was a rich day for identity related stories.
Feds Start Small on Smart IDs talks about the start of the roll out of
The use of personal identity verification, or PIV, cards for verifying the identities of all federal workers and contractors was mandated by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. The unfunded HSPD-12 mandate specified that agencies must adopt a common identification credential for access to government facilities and computer systems.
Friday’s deadline and an earlier one calling on agencies to develop procedures for verifying the identities and backgrounds of all workers by last October were both considered exceptionally aggressive because of funding issues and the technology and process changes required.
Does anyone know what the procedure they actually developed is?
The register reported that to buy a beer in the UK you will have to give your finger print. The rational is to reduce ‘drinking related crime’. It sounds freakishly Orwellian.
Beer fingerprints to go UK-wide:
The government is funding the roll out of fingerprint security at the doors of pubs and clubs in major English cities.
Funding is being offered to councils that want to have their pubs keep a regional black list of known trouble makers.
The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.
Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.
Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.
Offenders can be banned from one pub or all of them for a specified time – usually a period of months – by a committee of landlords and police called Pub Watch. Their offences are recorded against their names in the fingerprint system. Bradburn noted the system had a “psychological effect” on offenders.
The Home Office distanced itself from the plans. It said it provided funding to Safer, Stronger Communities through the Department for Communities and Local Government’s Local Area Agreements. How they spent the money was a local decision, said a HO spokeswoman.