Stowe Boyde and Drummond are going back and forth about tagging
Post 1 by Stowe
Post 2 by Stowe
Post 3 by Drummond
Post 4 by Stowe
Post 5 by Drummond
Big Ideas
Tagging using XRI
Drummond just posted a fantastic articulation how on might use XRI to do open tagging. Some of you may not be following the emergence of Tagging in the blogoshpere but it is really real with many services now empowering their members to tag. It has exploded so much that they have begun he World’s First Social Social Tagging Site Tagging Site site Supercilious. Tag Tuesday is the real hub of this emerging developer/social media creator community. Perhaps Drummond has just created the outlines for a presentation there I know Nile was asking for suggestions about who could present the next month so let them know when you will be in town D.
Announcing The Virtual Rights Symposium on Digital Identity & Human Rights
This is the first of what we hope to be an annual event about Digital
Identity and Human Rights covering social issues, policy and
legislation in this arena.
The goal is to foster international cooperation on virtual rights
through high quality dialogue and deliberation between legislators,
researchers, service providers, and citizens.
The symposium will begin in September with interaction online both
synchronous and asynchronous. It will peak with a meeting in Costa Rica November 17-18th and continue online afterwards.
Virtual Rights Association is organizing the event in cooperation with Costa Rica University and the Berkman Center. Chair Jaco Aizerman please contact him at =jaco or http://public.xdi.org/=jaco
Please go to thewebsite at Virtual Rights to see the current version of the agenda.
Jerry's experiment tomorrow
Jerry Michalskiis going to be doing an experiment tomorrow – Monday night at the Hillside club.
At this Fireside Meeting, Jerry will blend a performance piece that involves the audience and a piece of concept-mapping software called TheBrain with a thesis he’s developing that will either have you grinning enthusiastically or throwing spoiled vegetables. It’s an experiment, and whoever shows up will help shape it.
This is an interesting fact I didn’t know Marc Finnern posted on the Future Salon.
At AlwaysOn a week ago I talked to Doc Searls and he told me that the original idea for the Cluetrain Manifesto was born 10 years ago at one of Jerry’s retreats. There are many events in the Bay Area, but this one you shouldn’t miss.
As a forward looking thinker Jerry has a lot of good things to say about identity and we often chat about the field. I am looking forward to going to the next (my first) “Jerry’s retreat.” Hopefully he can come to the Identity Event in Berkeley in October details to follow this week.
Revolutionizing Marketing: The Business Case for XRI/XDI
Dear Marketing: An Open Letter From Your Customer
by Chris Maher of Fosforus
Opening:
Over the years, I have had an uneasy relationship with you. I’ve not cared one bit for being your prospect. And, as it seems that being your customer is just an extension of a permanent, unrelenting and ever-more-intrusive marketing campaign, I’m not nuts about being your customer, either.
He quotes David Glen Mick from a paper Searching for Byzantium: A Personal Journey into Spiritual Questions that Marketing Researchers Rarely Ask
Another set of spiritual questions we seldom ask ourselves concerns the effects of marketing and consumption on human character. By character I do not mean human values, but rather our psychological temperament as we go about our daily activities. What kind of person does marketing and consumption encourage or discourage?
Mick’s answers include examples of qualities of temperament that are, in his opinion, encouraged by marketing and consumption: impatience, incivility, judgmentalism and distrust.
He continues to articulate the problems with marketing and gets to the heart of the matter by offering a new model.
What I’m recommending is the creation of (what I will call) a “custnomer”: a data alias or new “name” for that me that gets profiled by your computer systems.
At a minimum, this will mean that my customer records and data won’t have my real name appended to them. There are too many thieves and scammers out there who are seeking to use my good name and the records attached to it. Grab your nearest CIO and Chief Privacy Officer (and maybe the Chief Security Officer, though that person is probably on Zoloft at present) by their lapels and strongly encourage them to begin in-depth research into the promising work on Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRI) and XRI Data Interchange (XDI).
The Daddy of XRI, Drummond Reed, is someone I consider a friend …is, without question, the darned nicest and most patient technology visionary that you will ever come across. There isn’t an ounce of ego in his dealings with us woefully common folk.
Warning: XRI/XDI is not some obscure, trivial “tech thing” that will only be meaningful to those who mumble to themselves and spend half their lifetimes slaughtering innocents and evil-doers… virtually, that is. XRI/XDI has encoded within it is a simple, powerful idea that will come true over time and will change your business: “My private data is mine.”
He goes on to highlight data anonymity and the work of Latanya Sweeney, Assistant Professor, Institute for Software Research International at Carnegie-Mellon University.
Here’s how Sweeney describes what she does:
Perhaps the biggest clash between technology and society involves privacy. The task of maintaining privacy and confidentiality in a globally networked, technically empowered society is quite difficult, tricky and fun.
Data privacy (or more precisely, data anonymity) is emerging as a new study within computer science that is the study of computational solutions for releasing information about entities (such as people, companies, governments) such that certain properties (such as identity) are controlled while the data remain practically useful. While these problems have been studied, in part, by statisticians and earlier computer scientists, their solutions have been rendered insufficient in today’s technically empowered society. So, in data anonymity, we develop new approaches and tools for today’s computational environment.
My colleagues and I (in the Laboratory for International Data Privacy, for which, I am the director) take a two-prong approach to data anonymity. On the one hand, we work as data detectives and on the other hand, we also work as data protectors.”
The best part is he finished up with the new business model.
I’m thinking that there’s probably some trustworthy business entity—although, I’m hard-pressed to figure out which it might be—that could serve as my proxy. (Now, banks and/or credit card companies, before you leap to any conclusions, take a long look at your information assurance practices and see the part of this article about the Trusted Computing Group.)
I would willingly provide just enough information, credentials and data that authenticate who I am and which, say, establish my credit-worthiness to a “trusted relationship proxy”: some government-certified, insured, audited, secure entity that would establish and manage the data version of “me” and would become the “gateway” to all (or many) of my most important business relationships. Think of this proxy as an agent who serves as a buffer between me and you.
TSA data cloud searching – Flights today, Subways tomorrow?
This article was slashdotted today.
TSA had promised it would only use the limited information about passengers that it had obtained from airlines. Instead, the agency and its contractors compiled files on people using data from commercial brokers and then compared those files with the lists.
The GAO reported that about 100 million records were collected.
The 1974 Privacy Act requires the government to notify the public when it collects information about people. It must say who it’s gathering information about, what kinds of information, why it’s being collected and how the information is stored.
And to protect people from having misinformation about them in their files, the government must also disclose how they can access and correct the data it has collected.
Before it began testing Secure Flight, the TSA published notices in September and November saying that it would collect from airlines information about people who flew commercially in June 2004.
Instead, the agency actually took 43,000 names of passengers and used about 200,000 variations of those names – who turned out to be real people who may not have flown that month, the GAO said. A TSA contractor collected 100 million records on those names.
It brings up some serious concerns about how information collection and validation is done by the TSA for airline passengers. How can we trust governments to collect this much information about us just because we travel.
This week I wonder why care about airlines passengers because security is so tight that airlines do not seem to be a place where the next round of attacks will be. If London is any indication it will be on mass transit. Given the level of police/security presence on the transit systems in the Bay Area this week is certainly seems like there is some concern that mass transit will be attacked. They have started random searching of bags to get on the NYC subway. One wonders if they will start issuing ‘identity passes’ to get on such systems.
On the city subways, which are used by 4.5 million people on the average workday, the inspections started on a small scale Thursday afternoon and were expanded Friday.
The New York Civil Liberties Union opposed the searches, saying they violated the Fourth Amendment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he hoped the NYCLU would recognize that the city had struck the right balance between security and protecting constitutional rights. He said the bag-checking program is part of a policy to “constantly change tactics” and “may, or may not, be there tomorrow.”
Index Finger Scanning at Disney World + FastTrack Scanning
This article was Slashdotted…
Tourists visiting Disney theme parks in Central Florida must now provide their index and middle fingers to be scanned before entering the front gates.
The scans were formerly for season pass holders but now everyone must provide their fingers, Local 6 News reported. They have reportedly been phased in for all ticket holders during the past six months, according to a report.
I think it’s a step in the wrong direction,” Civil Liberties Union spokesman George Crossley said. “I think it is a step toward collection personal information on people regardless of what Disney says.
I think this is self explanatory in terms of why it is concerning. It seems to goes along with what is now happening with FastTrack passes (automatic toll readers) that I heard about last night at the Hillside Club CyberSalon where Esther Dyson was speaking. I googled the phenomena and here are some excerpts of what I found.
In New York State, readers have been multiplying ever since September 1997, when the New York Police Department (NYPD) used E-Z Pass toll records to locate and track the movements of a car owned by Nelson G. Gross, a New Jersey millionaire who had been abducted and murdered. The NYPD had neither a subpoena nor a warrant to obtain those records; the police simply asked the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), and the MTA complied. This set a very bad precedent. Though Gross wasn’t alive to complain about it, his privacy had been violated. Access to those toll records also permitted access to all sorts of sensitive information, including his billing address, his credit card number, his license plate number and his Social Security number.
In February 1998, the MTA announced that — near the Tappan Zee Bridge (the site of the first reader in New York State, installed in 1993) — it had just concluded a successful “experiment” with readers that could detect and extract information from transponders even though the cars to which they were attached didn’t slow down. These “high-speed readers” were only three-feet tall and could be placed just about anywhere. As a result, they permitted the ETC system to do something it was never intended to do: namely, collect truly huge amounts of information about such non-toll related phenomena as traffic flows, speeds, densities and delays (all of which, incidentally, can be videotaped by either flow monitoring or security cameras that have been automatically activated by the readers).
Since then, high-speed readers have been installed along a great many State-owned roads and highways; they’ve also been installed atop many residential buildings in New York City.
Catalyst: Taoism and Identity
One of the most interesting things here at Catalyst has been the expression taoist quotes related to the identity.
Today’s Opening Slide
The Tao of Identity
Though thirty spokes may form a wheel,
it is the hole within the hub
which gives the wheel utility.
It is not the clay the potter throws,
which gives the pot its usefulness,
but the space within the shape,
from which the pot is made.
Without a door, the room cannot be entered,
and without windows it is dark.
Such is the utility of non-existance.
From yesterday
The Tao of Identity
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name…
We Cannot know the Tao itself,
nor see its qualities direct,
but only see by differentiation,
that which it manifests.
-lau tzu
——-
We also had some Tarot reading the first evening… who knew this crowd had spirituality flowing through it.
Catalyst: Logic of Identity – Bob Blakley Chief Scientist IBM
This is a summary of Bob Blakley’s talk at Burton Catalyst:
Opening – Sermon on Laws
Laws of Planetary Motion
Kim’s Laws what happens to Identity if you make stupid or subtle mistakes
Newtons Law – gravity
Why things happen
Introduction – Looking Back Digital Signatures
A while back we decided we needed non-repudiation and did digital signatures by issuing certificates.
We forgot to figure out why do signatures work in the real world.
So, we got how they worked wrong in the technical world.
Having signatures not work is bad looking forward having privacy not work is bad.
Body of Talk
Definition:
Identity is a collection of attributes by which a person or thing is generally recognized or known
Identity Relativity
The Identity of X according to Y: The set of attributes believed by Y to be true of X.
Axiom: Utility
An identity attribute has value if and only if knowing that attribute reduces risk for some party
Reducing one party’s risk often creates risks for other parties.
Consequence: Identification is Power
Identity allocates risk.The ability to create or eliminate a risk for another confers power over the other.
Axiom: Contention
Because identity claims allocate risks, they will be disputed.
Identity Attributes
- Commercial Interest – Convenience
- Government Interest – Security
- Individual interest – Privacy
Definition
Privacy: is the ability to lie about yourself and get away with it.
Axiom: Subjectivity
People disagree about one anothers identity attributes
In general, there’s now easy way to tell who’s right and who’s wrong
Axiom: Temporality
The name that can be named is not enduring and unchanging name. All identity attributes change over time.
- Prince -> symbol
- Michael Jackson Black -> Plastified
Axiom: Obscurity
Identity attributes can be
- what you know – you can lie
- what you have – loose / leave
- what you are – alter disguise
Axiom: Publicity
Identity attributes cannot be secret
By definition attributes aren’t observable can’t be used to use attributes
Axiom: Contextually
Identity is inherently subject to effect of scale.
Brandon Mayfield – guy who did not blow up trains
His finger print matched one at Madrid Bombing (it was not an accurate assertion)
Large databases -> not completely reliable
To scale identity information one needs to collect — more information
Consequence: Powerlessness
Identity is in they eye of the beholder – subjectivity.
- You can’t control what other people think or say about you.
- You can’t even know who knows what about you.
- Can control what you tell people but not what people find out
Consequence: Privacy Erosion
Scale requires distinguishing between lots of individuals which requires lots of information.
In a sufficiently large population the commonly agreed to be public attributes will not distinguishing individuals well enough.
So information about sensitive attributes will be collected.
In the UK they are look at putting in scanners (QinetiQ) while entering the subway to detect knives but what about creep in the use of other things identifying tatoos?
People push back against government identification.
Consequence: Due Process
Because identity is subjective, contextually, contention and obscurity and temporality.
IDENTIFICATION REQUIRES DUE PROCESS
But due process undermines the business case for identity. Due process requires transparency. Transparency reveals how identity attributes are collected and synthesized to make judgment. Collection and Synthesis are the only sources of completive value.
They do it because they like costumer intimacy.
Supply and Demand mismatch between favorable and unfavorable information.
Favorable information is easy to get.
The subject is happy to give it to you and the subject is happy to help you authenticate it. Therefore the supply is large and the value is low. But it’s worse: Demand is also low! Because favorable information is less likely to reduce another party’s risk. Especially the case when the other party has lots of potential customers.
The business case fore identity service provider infringes privacy.
The business of identity service providers is risk reduction withholding adverse information decrease the value of business.
Collecting more adverse information makes more.
Identity and Privacy are Incompatible.
Adverse information has positive identity value but negative privacy value.
Favorable information has zero identity value and zero privacy value.
Fable about MARIA
Recent guatemalan immigration
she has AIDS and she doesn’t want anyone to know. The health insurance company wants to know this information because it is a $180,000 not to know this.
Catalyst: SSO Simple Secure and Open – Dick on Identity .20
Dick – had a 580 slide deck done Lessig Style
This is a summary of his talk:
We found out about Dick’s Identity
We learned a about what Identity is
What I say about me
What other say about me (others trust this)
So,
identity=reputaiton
What others say about you
We learned about Identity Transactions:
Verbal in person (with visual cues)
Talk on phone (loss of visual cues)
Job Application (fill out form)
We learned about data verification using drivers licenses in the real world and how the process reduces Identity Friction.
Identity Transactions are Asymmetrical
There is separation of the acquisition and presentation of credential
The credential is reusable
Trust is social
What is digital identity?
Identity 1.0 Today
Today it is the hassel of filling out the same information again and again.
Basically today authentication is that you get to prove you are an entry in a directory entry. single authority on one credential – not portable – in silo.
Verified digital Identity is not what you give a site today.
e-bay -/-> Craigslist
We have walled gardens
Identity 2.0 is where the user can move it to any site.
Simple and open has a history of winning in new standards look at:
- networking
- web – html
WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?
Identity Credential exchange is transparent transaction that is scalable.
WHO WILL DRIVE THIS?
users? – to many user names and passwords
won’t pay – little influence
enterprise? – partners, contracts, agents
but risky to lead… can’t get there
Identity 1.5
e-government?
maybe
but localized
Banks?
motivated to solve
theoretical trust relationship
Identity Ecosystem will emerge where
users are loosely coupled
share user identity
We are in a new era
Webservices – Flickr, Mappr, SalesForce
Web 2.0 will drive identity 2.0
It will happen on the edge of the Internet (not the edge of the enterprise).
XRI/XDI no web-service apps
SXIP
name/value pairs
DIGS XML
The goal is to mimic photo ID
With Sxip Network
SXIP 1.0 has had a few tire kickers
SXORE Blog comment spam solution
SXIP 2.0 support web services
SXIP ACCESS
SSO – Simple Secure and Open
Jamie Lewis –
Q: So will this go into a STANDARDS PROCESS?
A: We are working on it. We want to get it very close to right then put it into standards body. I like IETF. Our goal is to be open
Reputation System for Web 2.0
Jamie Lewis is giving a great talk here at his conference on User-Centrism Meets Polycentrism: Creating Identity Infrastructure for the Internet. One of the things that he mentioned was Identity Commons and my representation of that ecology here at the conference.
He also highlighted the fact that reputation systems have a role to play. I have been working as the Blogosphere Advisor to a start up working on OPEN REPUTATION SERVICES – Opinity. They have a blog too.
One of my new friends in the industry who is a Service Integrator (SI) working on massive enterprise integration projects thought that the talk likely went over the majority of the audience’s head.
Catalyst: Government Adoption of Federated Identity
This is drawn from David Temoshok’s Talk. He is the Director of Identity Policy and Management GSA Office of Government Policy
Homeland security directive 12
“Policy for Common Identification Standard For Federal Employees and Contractors” – August 2004
HSPD 12 Requirements
1. Secure and reliable forms of personal identification that are:
- Based on sound criteria to verify an individual employee’s identity
- Strongly resistant to fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation
- Rapidly verified electronically
- Issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process
2. Applicable to all government organizations and contractors except National Security Systems
3. Used for access to federally-controlled facilities and logical access to federally-controlled information systems
4. Flexible in selecting appropriate security level – includes graduated criteria from least secure to most secure
5. Implemented in a manner that protects citizens’ privacy
Expanding Electronic Government
Needing Common Authentication Services for
- 280 million Citizens
- Millions of Businesses
- Thousands of Government Entities
- 10+ Million Federal Civilian and Military Personnel
You can learn more on the GSA website – http://www.gsa.gov/aces
Catalyst: Information Compliance Scott Blackmer
One of the most interesting things Scott mentioned today was the proposed Leahy-Spector Bill in congress that would regulate identity brokers and come into effect in June 2005.
– Enact a bevy of new regulations that cover “data brokers,” defined as business or non-profits “in the practice of collecting, transmitting, or otherwise providing personally identifiable information on a nationwide basis on more than 5,000 individuals.” Among the regulations: data brokers would have to allow consumers the chance to change their information, and as with a credit report, receive a copy of that information at their request.
— Require businesses not already covered by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act or HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) to create a data privacy and security program. That part of the Leahy-Specter bill also expands disclosure rules nationwide, and mandates that customers be informed of any security breach involving more than 10,000 people, or that revolved around a database with more than a million entries.
— Limit the ways that Social Security numbers can be used as account numbers. This section also bans the sale of Social Security numbers, one of the data bits sold to fraudsters by ChoicePoint in 2004 and disclosed in February 2005.
— And forces the General Services Administration (GSA) to review government contractors’ the privacy and security programs before awarding contracts. This last item came from the recent news that the Internet Revenue Service had awarded a $20 million contract to ChoicePoint.
These new potential regulations have implications for the folks working on DB/datasharing in the nonprofit sector. Any individual with a big mailing list might be responsible to comply. Small businesses will be affected.
YASN (yet another social network)
Simpatico Networks – so far there are no blog posts about them.
They link out to the who’s who of social media on the blogoshpere from their Social Networking 2.0 including ClayShirky, danah boyd, Dave Weinberger, Many-to-Many, Ross Mayfield, Stowe Boyd – my friend Jerry Michalski and Wikipedia.
Seems like their current implementations are focused on different faith communities.
Spaces for Identity
This was from the Future Salon:
Outer Space (the world around us: science, the natural and built environment, universal systems theory)
Human Space (the human world: our bodies, behavior, minds, human systems theory)
Inner Space (the world below: energy, small tech, computer “bodies”, inner systems theory)
Cyber Space (the virtual world: computer “behavior”, computer “minds”, cyber systems theory)
Hyper Space (the world beyond: new paradigms, phase transitions, hyperphysics, hyper systems theory)
Relationships are the crossing of boundaries between things.
This happens within our selves and between others.
Maintaining right relationship and boundaries between these is what helps energy flow well.
Cato: Radical Evolution – Joel Garreau Pt 1
So this a reprint… it was on my old blog.
To clarify for those of you confused my comments are indented and in italics. I never did get to publishing part two either. Hopefully this week.
I heard this talk on June 17 at the Cato Institute / The Economist Luncheon LIberty, Technology and Prosperity in San Francisco by Joel Garneau author of Radical Evolution.
Joel’s introduction was given by The Economist SF corespondent.
He has five hats the most interesting of those seemed to be a TROLL as in the norse mythological figure who hangs out in the woods and looks after the forest.
He is editor of the Washington Post Style section. Is a scenario planner at the Global Business Network. He also has a consulting firm the Garneau group – with him and his best sources. He also dabbles in Academia.
He has authored three books – The
Nine Nations of North America, Edge City – life on the new frontier and the topic of today’s talk Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies and what it means to be human.
Joel Garneau
We are at turning point in human history because of the fundamental changes in what it means to be human in the next 10-20-30 years. The change in the technologies we are working on today is that they are not focused outward on – fire, cloths,
They are focused inward on us – Modifying our minds, memory, metabolism our kids and what it means to be human.
These changes in science have significant political implications. They are changing VC’s have to look at the world.
When I heard this I mentally noted the oddity of it being the next statment. It sort of implied that there was a way in which their decisions had a profound effect on the future – and perhaps they do but should they have this big a power to shape it – how do we discuss and discern about these issues that affect the whole of society?
Their will be changes in cultures and values on our watch in real time. The future is being driven by the curve of accelerated change. How many people have heard of Moores Law – about 1/2 of the audience raised their hands. The data point on this is that normally only 10% of the audience does. We have had 29 doublings of computing since 1959 – that is 40,000,000 times.
This curve did not suddenly start out with the chip. We are in a third sort of evolution of what it means to be human. Darwin and chimps it took 8,000 years to get reading and writing.
Technosis is a great book to understand ‘writing’ as a technology that profoundly shaped culture.
To give perspective rail roads changed everything they touched and the number of miles of rail road miles was only 14 times.
In 1800 we started the industrial age an example of this curve is that in 1903 we had the first flight and 66 years later we were on the moon.
These changes are exponential and change all of society. This curve that we are riding – I don’t see where it levels off.
The limitations are – Quantum Mechanics – The Marketplace – Human ingenuity (he sees no limits to these three)
Finally our willingness to shape culture and values. I am interested in human relationship and love and lies.
WE ARE IN A TIME OF RADICAL EVOLUTION
We are charging the shape of what it is to be human.
Fleet of technology – affect how mind, memory and metabolism works.
I spent a year with DARPA Spent Year with DARPA. They see the week link in the war fighting machine as us – humans themselves. Lets meet the first telekinetic monkey who can move objects through her thoughts.
We hook her on computer games moving a cursor with a joyce stick.
Drill hole in head near motor quartex and put in a mesh of extremely fine Wires that connect with neurons.
See the patterns in the mind when operating the joyce stick
Disconnect the joyce stick.
Just use mind to move the cursor
Hook up robot arm that moves with cursor movements.
WHY????
The defense reason that F22 is difficult to control with joyce stick. If you could control with mind <-> machine connenction. Feeding information into skull real time…blur line between made and born. That is the official reason we are doing this. The real reason is the guy who heads the lab has a daughter with ceribal palsy who can’t walk on her own and what if she could control machines with her thoughts that moved he legs? This is a dramatic change in what it means to be human.
The Berry Bonds – steroid controversy – is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what does it mean to be enhanced? – what are the social implications? Should he have an asterix next to his name because he is not the same type of human being as those who’s records he broke?
There will be people who are delighted to adopt these advances.
There will be NATURALS who are like todays vegetarians
The REST – for reasons of geography or economics are not enhanced and will envy and despise those who are. THIS HAS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES.
What is driving this is GRIN – Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nanotechnology.
To be continued…
Next gen phone aps – interesting future identity use.
Found in this article about next generation phone apps with interesting identity applications.
Curious about the people around you? Pantopic takes the openness, and, well, ‘browseability’ of an online community into the real world. Once you install pantopic, your phone becomes like a webpage that only people in your immediate area can read.
The fun part comes when you link up with pantopic groups in your area. Once you do, you’ll be able to get information about who your friends are hanging out with, and where. It’s going to be a few years before a lot of people have this technology. Pantopic tries to solve the saturation problem by focusing on seeing activity in your groups.
Identity as Citizen Journalist
If you want an identity as a citizen journalist there are Flickr Photographer Press Passes available here.
Web 2.O comodification – great post
This post on the comodifiication of Web 2.0. It is worth reading to begin to understand microforamts and why identity is important to make them even cooler.
Implanted RFID club entrance/human debit card
A while back there was the DIY RFID that I blogged about. Today there is this story in the Financial Times about exclusive clubs offering their most prestigious patrons embedded chips the size of a rice grain to give them privileged access to their clubs. It has a whole history of this technology.
One night in Barcelona last year, a young Dutchman named Antoine Hazelaar received a strange proposition from the owner of a local nightspot, the Baja Beach Club. The club had just started a new programme called VipChip, he was told, and for E125, a qualified nurse could inject a device the size of a grain of rice, a VeriChip, into his upper arm. Once implanted, it would transmit an ID number to a scanner that would recognise Hazelaar as a special customer, so he wouldn’t have to wait in line and would get access to a private lounge. Since he would be one of the first people to be injected, the nightclub’s management would waive the initiation fee.
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Hazelaar agreed. At about 8pm one spring evening, in front of a throng of journalists, he sat down on a sofa in the cavernous Baja with another Dutch expat and a Spanish woman, ready to be injected. Bandages, needles and syringes were ceremoniously laid out on a cocktail table. Thanks to a local anaesthetic, Hazelaar didn’t feel the long shaft, about the size of a large sewing needle, as it entered his flesh. He didn’t feel the chip either, and a year later, he still doesn’t. “I forgot that I had it until you called,” he said.
Now, every time Hazelaar visits the Baja, he strides past the queue outside and goes straight to the doorman, who scans his arm until his name and photograph pop up on a computer screen. When he goes through another checkpoint at the special VipChip lounge, the number under his flesh becomes a payment instrument, like a loyalty card at Starbucks.
A waitress runs a scanner over his right bicep and the cost of a drink is deducted from his account.
As it turns out, Hazelaar became one of the world’s first human debit cards. But he wasn’t the last. The Baja now has 90 implanted VIPs; there are 70 at its sister club in Rotterdam, which opened last November. Even though the injection now costs E1,500 per person – including a E500 drinks credit – both establishments have waiting lists. Club co-owner Conrad Chase, a former star of the Spanish version of Big Brother, says his group might expand to Valencia and Hamburg, where they will also offer VipChip membership.
Some might say that this technology was inevitable, but how has this slightly creepy device become even remotely popular? And will it one day become part of everyday life?
…..
Ultimately, the choice is fear versus fear. What makes people feel most vulnerable? A hacker running up to them with a scanner, or news stories of rampant ID theft, infant abductions, botched surgeries, convicts on the run and terrorists among us? The VeriChip may be an extreme solution for extreme times, but the days when it could be dismissed as futuristic fancy are clearly long past.
Planet 2.0
I just found this link to Planet 2.0. Thought you all might like to know about it.