Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

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Polar Rose soon to search photos for faces on the web

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This story comes from Slashdot. A startup Polar Rose is about to launch a face search tool.

Polar Rose relies on a combination of our unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users….we don’t and can’t rely exclusively on face recognition, but also harness the collective intelligence of our users who help train our software and tag names on people we haven’t seen before.
We will open up for a royalty-free use of our API’s, which will allow for partners to integrate the Polar Rose functionality into existing sites or create stand-alone applications of Polar Rose, for example:
* A news site that wants to let users help tag photos, and link stories together based on who appears in photos.
* A photo-sharing site that wants to let users automatically tag new uploads, and search and sort archives based on the people in a photo.
* A social networking or dating site that wants to wants to help users find more pictures of a person, elsewhere on the net or just in the photos of the person’s friends.
The only significant requirements we put for the use of the APIs, is that the Polar Rose signature rose is used, and data that users generate is passed back to us on a non-exclusive basis. The reason being that every piece of data helps train our engine.

Some have privacy concerns. I certainly do – when Riya was pitching similar face recongintion for a flickr like tool I was creeped out. They are now doing a visual search engine so you can put in a purse or boot that you like and it searches for purses and boots like that.

Privacy concerns from New Scientist:
Polar Rose and future developments that make facial recognition available to the masses risk encroaching on people’s privacy, warns Yaman Akdeniz, director of the UK non-profit group Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties.
“Although this sounds like a great idea, I would not like to be searchable in this way, or so easily tracked without my consent,” says Akdeniz. The database compiled by Polar Rose is similar to the kind of biometric database some governments wish to use, he points out.
“I wonder whether they have a right to build such a database,” says Akdeniz, he suggests people think twice before embracing such potentially intrusive tools, and consider which photos of themselves they allow online.
Others agree. Simon Davies, director of the campaign group Privacy International and a specialist in technology and privacy at the London School of Economics, UK, says face-searching technology is valuable but must be used responsibly.
He fears Polar Rose could help identity thieves or stalkers, or even be used by the police to monitor protesters. “They could use the service to find where people have been, what their activities are, or who they associate with,” he says.
Search engines should allow users to prevent their photos being searched, says Davies. “There should be a way to put code in a webpage that signals you want to opt out,” he told New Scientist.

Scott Says: Data is the New Software

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I like the sound of that could it be Data 2.0?
Scott Keveton has a great post on why the big guys should adopt OpenID and hopefully Open Standards for Data too. He has three more reasons besides these two great ones:

Data is the new software: People may laugh at me on this, but its not the software. Software is effectively free now. Content management systems, wikis, blogs and even operating systems are commodities now. Its what you do with the software that is interesting. Its the sets of data that you can create and correlate together that are really, really interesting. Just look at Google. They arguably use more open source (aka free software) than anybody around. Its how they hook that software together and correlate the data from their users that’s the interesting stuff. Now, when you have lots of data, identifying who did what becomes the key. We haven’t had a thin layer of identity to do this in the past. OpenID gives us that layer of identity and more importantly a way for users and sites to correlate and better represent data that the users are creating.
Data + Identity == GoodStuff: As per my last item, data coupled to identity is really interesting. What’s even more interesting than that are the things you can do with identity and data coupled together. Now that I am this one identity for all of the places that I’m going on the Internet, I can really start to provide some services for that OpenID that I couldn’t before. Attributes, reputation, trust and social networking are some of the interesting areas to look at when it comes to OpenID in 2007

Snapping around the web – Why we like groups….

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From Psych 1271 at Northeastern University
Social Identity Theory
o We like in-groups because we are motivated to achieve and maintain a positive self-image.
o This self-image has two components.
+ Personal Identity
+ Social identities, which derive from our associations with groups.
o Thus, when our group succeeds, we succeed, which bolsters our self-image.
o This process is shown in the next slide.

Snapping around the web to find Identity Theory

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I went to TechCrunch today as I am apt to do on a weekly basis.
The top post was on the Million Dollar homepage. When you scrolled over it this box came up saying one could use Snap to search the web with pictures. So I tried it. typing in ‘identity’ to the search box. Identity Theory was the first site that camp up. It has several navigation links

  • interviews
  • fiction
  • nonfiction
  • music
  • social justice
  • film
  • books
  • visuals
  • verse
  • blogs

maybe if they meet us they might add a category for ‘digital’

Killer Robots are Real

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I thought this was a sad article from Slashdot about killer robots. It makes me concerned about the marriage of such robots and identifying technology. Maybe I am being paranoid but one must ‘design for evil’ as Bruce Sterling says.

Design For Evil”
Any innocent product which becomes suddenly genocidal in the hands of a tyrant has been designed by a dangerous naif. Every design process is incomplete unless it takes into careful consideration what could be done with the product by a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, a secret police, and a large army.

More Slashdot Stories of interest.

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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

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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.

Winning The Digital Identity World Award

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So today was a big day. Digital Identity World gave me their yearly award for my work ‘behind the scenes’ work with the Identity Gang and the Internet Identity Workshop. It feels great to be seen in for over two years of hard work.
I really owe a great debt to Jim Fournier and Elizabeth Thompson for founding Planetwork and bringing together an amazing community from which I learned a lot and got me inspired to work in technology. They worked hard to bring the Link Tank together who’s output was at least partially captured i n the Augmented Social Network White Paper. If you are trying to figure out user-centric identity and what it might mean socially this is still a critical document for that.
Owen Davis deserves a lot of thank yous for his personal vision, intellectual contribution and putting up his own money to work on addressing the social issues that arise with a user-centric identity layer by forming Identity Commons. His decision to hire me gave me my first real job in this space where I learned a lot and began building a network of relationships that became at the heart of the current community.
Of course we must thank our family and my husband Brian has been supportive of my crazy travel schedule to serve and evangelize about goings on inside the community.
I really love the community and thank all of you for your support and I must particularly thank Phil Windley and Doc Searls for there partnership with me in producing the Internet Identity Workshop and Identity Open Spaces.
Come to the Workshop in December it will be a great time.

Think cxap

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Watch the video

Damian Conway’s killer parody presenation at oscon….the final animated slide.

This was the best presentation by being “the worst’ one ever. Damian made fun of bad presentations by putting everything bad into one big dooser. It made fun of Dick’s presentations on Sxip, r0ml, Kathy Sierra, Ruby on Rails, patents, pantent firms and was just hilarious.

i-names in the sphere

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With the launch of i-names about two weeks ago it thought I would review some the coverage because it is interesting how people put all this stuff into there own words.
The most enthusiastic I-names mention in the shpere came from
derpressionisms with the title i love i names and so will you. It is great to see someone get it so deeply so quickly (he just learned about them the week of launch). It is really worth reading if you are trying to understand how it all works. One thing that is off though is the reference to XNS. That became XRI and XDI – two different open OASIS standards. By splitting the identifier stuff (XRI) from the data sharing stuff (XDI) it is more adoptable.

Saunders also picked up on inames calling them Your Portable Identity.

It looks as if the dream of a user controlled, portable identity is about to become a reality. I’ve been swapping email with Kaliya Hamlin about identity standards. She has pointed me to inames.net, a commons for identity. Christine Herron has also recently written about this effort.
What’s an iname? It’s a human friendly handle (mine is =alec.saunders) for a person or organization that you can use to organize all of your identity bits in one place – email addresses, phone numbers, IM handles and so on. Like DNS, you simply pick a registrar, and select a name. Services include single sign-on, contact, forwarding, and a unified address book.
Cool!

Someone also highlighted the idea of Identity Networks being here.

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From the How-old-are-we-anyways department…

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Discovery magazine had this article online addressing the ‘age depression‘ we might have created with our modern educational system. It is interesting to think about how extreme specialization can also lead to immaturity in other aspects of life. I was thinking about it and wondered if WoW and other quest like games might help address some of the need for rights of passage and create opportunities for social learning with diverse groups of people.

 

A “child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge” is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, “unfinished.”
“The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product — the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity,” he explained.
“But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility.”
“When formal education continues into the early twenties,” he continued, “it probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age.”
Charlton pointed out that past cultures often marked the advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies.

Identity on Rails

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Last weekend there as the first official Ruby on Rails Conference in Chicago. OpenID, Rails and Identity 2.0: Building and Cultivating an Identity Ecosystem. was presented by Matt Pelletier owner of EastMedia a Ruby development shop in NYC that has done a lot of the coding for the Verisign PIP And Kiran Dandekar is a colleague of David Recordon at Verisign and presented at a different time as well….
Here are some of the best summaries from the blogosphere…
Blogging RailsConf:

Digital identity sucks!
* Repetitive
* Complex and inconsistent
* Poor UI
* Lack of control
* Unnecessary

notkeepingitreal.com:

An Open Identity system should be…
* Extensible
* User managed
* Open
* Perpetual (not just used once)
It’s about you
* The general idea is that when you go to a site, you are redirected back to your site, where you log in. The site that you intended to go to communicates to your site and confirms your identity, allowing you into the site you wanted to go to in the first place. And best of all, once you do login once, you’re on: Single Sign On!
* There are attributes that you control. You can specify the attributes that you want to share with each site.
* Some attributes (such as age, like if you are on a site selling alcoholic beverages) need to be verified. Certain companies would then be in the business of verifying OpenID attributes.

Fingerprints of Casper Fabricius

Kiran Dandekar made an entertaining point out of demonstrating the variety of information that has be made available about him in different contexts like business, community, family or alumni. The problem is, he stated, that identities and identity attributes are site centric on the web, so you have to start from scratch entering this information on every site and even identifying yourself, as opposed to when you – for example – board in the airport, and all the airline need to verify your identity is your driver’s license. The driver’s license is not issued by the airline, but nevertheless is accepted to identify you, because the issuer of the identity is trusted.

Kuniforum:

Matt’s presentation on Sunday morning was on OpenID and is definitely something I intend to track, as the architecture seems really viable. Way smarter than Passport.

BloggingRailsConf:

Project Bantay
* Blend Yadis + OpenID and offer them as a service
* Building an identity 2.0 stack
o Protocol support
o Yadis
o OpenID 1.1
o http://openidenabled.com
o Mongrel
o A natural fit for HTTP-heavy protocols
o Tight, fast, secure
o Support for Handlers, Filters
o Zed Shaw is the man
o Identity server
o Single sign on
o Profile management
o Trust requests
o Consumer plugin
o Rails plugin
o Push-button simplicity
o Leverage Rails conventions
o Play nice with “old” idiom of user silo
o Bookmarks demo application
o Testing
o Interesting test environment
o Test libraries
o Test handlers
o Test Rails app
o Test cross-site functionality (Selenium)
o Mongrel Rules!
An identity ecosystem
* Cultivating Services
o Claims verification
o Dating sites: verify your gender
o pr0n: verfiy your age
o Job application: verify your green card
o No posting to kids’ blogs unless you’re <= 14
o Reputation
o Seller reputation
o Weenie reputation
o You can’t post blog comments
o No committing to Rails trunk unless you’re a verified pouty artsy wanker
o Trusting identity providers
+ Needs to be discussed
+ Trust chain
o Wide open marketplace
o Develop creative new services
Next steps
* Download the plugin – identity.eastmedia.com
* Download the bookmarks demo app
* Identity Server to be released this summer
* Play around. Use your noodle.

Internet Highjackings on the rise

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This past weekend although at home I spent quite a bit of time in Freenode IRC channels for BarCamp and BloggerCon. There were all these weird messages popping up in the corner of my screen – now I know why….

The world’s largest FOSS IRC network, FreeNode, has been (for lack of a better word) hijacked. The culprit, who went by the nickname ratbert, seems to have nabbed the privleges of Robert Levin, President and Executive Director of Peer-Directed Projects Center (FreeNode’s parent organization), AKA lilo. Whew! As if that wasn’t enough in itself, ratbert pushed out an offensive global message and attempted a DCC SEND exploit. He then proceded to kill and/or k-line every staff member in sight, including lilo, and brought down quite a few of FreeNode’s servers.
The rest is too broad and too long to log in full, but mainly consists of FreeNode staff members being killed (with some colorfully interesting reason messages) and cries of “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” and other expressions of terror throughout the many channels of FreeNode.

"I don't have home but I have a blog"

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This is interesting how technology can actually help the homeless from Wired.

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.
“Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families,” Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel.
Las Vegas vagrant Kevin Barbieux runs a blog that’s brought him a dose of digital stardom. He’s been writing The Homeless Guy since 2002. “It’s the only real success I’ve had in my life,” he said. Barbieux’s site garners 12,000 to 15,000 hits a month. He attributes that to the storytelling ethic of his posts, which detail not only his own travails, but those of colleagues in shelters and city parks. Technology has helped him collect donations through a PayPal button on his web page instead of having to panhandle.
Having a presence online can be a problem. Hellerich deleted most blog posts from her homeless days when a prospective employer Googled her and found the page (it cost her the job).

Harvard through Canadian Eyes

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Landing in in Cambridge at Harvard today for the start of the ‘identity Mashup‘. The experience of east coast norms of ‘elitism’ have been something that I have had to acclimatize to as I come out here to go to events and conferences. It also is something that rubs up against my “west coast” and “Canadian egalitarianism.” Malcome Gladwell a Canadian and author of The Tipping POint and Blink, captures the subtle world view difference in his recent essay in the New Yorker “Getting In” The article is long but I have exerted here if you want to get the gist of his thesis.
Here is the main thesis from the end of the article in case you don’t want to read to the end.

Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.

Some quotes from the beginning of the essay…

There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did.
What is this “Harvard” of which you Americans speak so reverently?
By the nineteen-sixties, Harvard’s admissions system had evolved into a series of complex algorithms. The school began by lumping all applicants into one of twenty-two dockets, according to their geographical origin. (There was one docket for Exeter and Andover, another for the eight Rocky Mountain states.)
Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful.
At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide.
The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps, and, sure enough, the studies based on those two apparently equivalent students turn out to be flawed.
You are whom you admit in the élite-education business, and when Harvard changed whom it admitted, it changed Harvard.
The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance. “Should our goal be to select a student body with the highest possible proportions of high-ranking students, or should it be to select, within a reasonably high range of academic ability, a student body with a certain variety of talents, qualities, attitudes, and backgrounds?
Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars,
This is, in no small part, what Ivy League admissions directors do. They are in the luxury-brand-management business, and “The Chosen,” in the end, is a testament to just how well the brand managers in Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton have done their job in the past seventy-five years.
Harvard wants good graduates, and part of their definition of a good graduate is someone who is a generous and loyal alumnus. And if you want generous and loyal alumni you have to reward them. Aren’t the tremendous resources provided to Harvard by its alumni part of the reason so many people want to go to Harvard in the first place? The endless battle over admissions in the United States proceeds on the assumption that some great moral principle is at stake in the matter of whom schools like Harvard choose to let in—that those who are denied admission by the whims of the admissions office have somehow been harmed. If you are sick and a hospital shuts its doors to you, you are harmed. But a selective school is not a hospital, and those it turns away are not sick. Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite —and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.

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