Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Microsoft

Identity issues: Identity.Foundation vs. Decentralized.id

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So the the Decentralized Identity Foundation has an “identity challenge” with a project pretending to be it – with a very similar domain name and trying to do a token sale.  I have a theory that almost all legitimate projects with real people and real work going on behind them also have fake projects shadowing them.  Anyways.
Here is the REAL Decentralized Identity Foundation Website: http://identity.foundation. Its got working groups and code and a blog on medium.  Its got a whole bunch of real people and projects behind it.
They are working on supporting the emergence of an open standard called DID.
Microsoft just made an announcement about their support and product integration of these emerging open standards.
 

So the FAKE site is Decentralized.id

It looks really polished and the first page says
YOUR ID: DECENTRALIZED
The DID Foundation, Decentraling your ID over the Blockchain. Sounds good right.  Protecting Your ID, Providing Trust, Crypto-Positive. It says one should Join The Foundation – if you do you get DID Tokens!
Then creating a supply 20,000,000,000 of them. They are selling them for .ooo1 USD. They accept BTC, ETH and BCH.
So I checked out their real “address” is at a hot desking space in London.

Decentralized ID is owned by Mr. Sheikh Abdullah Naveed. HE also has a hardware consultancy Torquesol UK Ltd. He has some other companies too – Tapfer Technologies Ltd  and Fry-Wi Ltd
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This whole situation highlights the need to have identity verification for organizations too.  The good thing is that this is something that the British Columbia Government is working on with a project called Verifiable Organizations Network 

what about Flickr?

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I don’t want to get to emotional about this

But this is how I feel about the Microsoft letter and flickr. I am not even that big a flickr user but I like it – I joined when all my friends in the tech world were signing up and sharing photos and I wanted to to. It was at the time an independent company and was subsequently acquired by Yahoo! Now with this hostile take over situation with MSFT it could be owned by THEM. It is really devastating to think that all the energy I and others put into this space would be owned by THEM. BTW this also applies to Delicious – I don’t use it that much but I like it.
The thing I wonder about is – could the fans of flickr (and delicious) raise enough money to buy them from Yahoo! to prevent them being owned by MSFT. I bet you there would be enough community support (read money) that would come forward to prevent the sale. I really could care less about Yahoo!’s home page or its search or even its mail services – MSFT can have them for all I care. I do care about the products and services I use and have an emotional resonance with me cause I LIKE THEM. How can community space be owned by communities – could flickr become the first consumer cooperative on the web? I know I am dreaming big and this is not likely but I just had to put it out there.
Update: I am making a strong distinction between the acquisition of Yahoo! the internet portal/services company and the identity efforts that MSFT is an active participant.
So let me be totally clear I completely respect all the people that I have met at MSFT working on user-centric digital identity.
Every promise Kim Cameron has made to the community about openness and disclosure has happened. There has been real collaboration between the OpenID community and MSFT culminating with their joining the board. At RSA last week MSFT was a very active participant and supporter of the OSIS interop. Mike Jones is doing amazing work to weave all the efforts together so a real identity meta-system with plurality can emerge.
All the MSFT participants have been more then good community actors since the identity gang began over three years ago now.
I distinguish between their work in the field of identity AND the potential aquision/takeover of the same company one of the major internet portals – that I happen to have a strong personal relationship with. Last time I checked it wasn’t the “great” identity guys that would be in charge of the new Yahoo! acquisition – I am happy to be proven wrong though.
I don’t feel it is right to ask me to be silent about my discomfort regarding this impending acquisition.

Identity Panel at Mix07

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We had a great panel at Mix07 Microsoft’s Developers Conference. It was moderated by Marc Canter, with Kim Cameron, Scott Kveton and myself.
We opened with a context setting presentation (up on slideshare) that I put together to help get us started.
Marc hammered the point home that Single-Sign-On was not ‘enough’ we all agreed.
We talked about security issues and how CardSpace was one option to address the challenge of phishing.
We talked about how Authentication (SSO) was different then data sharing and how we need to figure out how people connect data between different sessions.
I said we needed “myAPI” so that we could let people conntect their data and not give away their username and password to connect stuff up (like they have to do today).
Marc said that the IIW was just a talk fest that he would not go to. I pointed out that the IOS in Brussels last week OpenID and ID-WSF
Marc criticized Facebook for the terms that they release face-book data under saying it could not be shown to anyone except Facebook members. The Facebook guy stood up and said that he was misinterpreting the meaning of it – what it really said was that if a user had certain people who could see different things those preferences needed to be respected.
Marc got down on his knees and apologized while singing the end of an aria – it was very entertaining.
We also got to hear about Sharks and Toasters. Many people are afraid of sharks but more people die every year because from using a toaster but no one is afraid of toasters.
Over all it was a great session. Thanks to all who participated.

There is no power in sessions at Mix06

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Apparently MS seems to think we are about 5 yrs ahead of time using 10 hour fuel cell batteries or something in our laptops.
There are literally NO power bar outlets in the seating area of the entire 1300 person auditorium for keynotes. The walls on either side are ‘flexiwalls’ so no power from them. There is one outlet with two plugs in this main hall. In the breakout session rooms there are a couple outlets at the back. I went and asked why they didn’t have plugs and they were like we have wifi. I was like “power cord plugs” they were like oh?
Scoble (who was part of organizing this) – you would think that they would meet peoples power needs. Heck they have seat beanbags with Mix embroidered on them. One thing they get right even if the wifi isn’t working is that there is power.

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To MS we are just customers

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It seems to me that their language regarding those of us who use their stuff – customers. Individuals who buy stuff most notably not creators.
All the people who come to your website are coming there to ‘do business with you’ according to the browser guy. Not to join, participate, cooperate, create, etc.

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