Skip to main content

Identity Panel at Supernova, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love User Centric Identity

Image
By
The Identity Panel just wrapped up:
(John Clippinger, Kaliya Hamlin, Reid Hoffman, Marcien Jenckes, Jyri Engestrom)
As our lives increasingly straddle the physical and the virtualworlds, the management of identity becomes increasingly crucial fromboth a business and a social standpoint.  The future of e-commerce anddigital life will require identity mechanisms that are scalable,secure, widely-adopted, user-empowering, and at least as richlytextured as their offline equivalents.  This session will examine howonline identity can foster relationships and deeper value creation.
It was interesting to see the reactions from the crowd and on the #supernova backchannel.  There's a lot of reactions of the form "but I want to be anonymous" though what they really mean is psuedoanonymous.  It's not really made clear that OpenID enables all those scenarios.  There were objections to calling things like OpenID "identity" and maybe some people think that's something of a meme grab.

OpenID is definitely very simple, very focused on doing just one part of identity.  It enables the unbundling of identity, authentication, and services.  It lets you say "this X is the same as this other X from last week, or from this other site" in a verifiable way that's under the control of X.  Is there a better word for this than "identity"?

Also, every discussion of OpenID should start out with a simple demo:  I type =john.panzer at any web site, and it lets me in.  Then talk about the underpinnings and the complications after the demo.

Tags: , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Personal Web Discovery (aka Webfinger)

By
There's a particular discovery problem for open and distributed protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, and OpenSocial.  It seems like a trivial problem, but it's one of the stumbling blocks that slows mass adoption.  We need to fix it.  So first, I'm going to name it:

The Personal Web Discovery Problem:  Given a person, how do I find out what services that person uses?
This does sound trivial, doesn't it?  And it is easy as long as you're service-centric; if you're building on top of social network X, there is no discovery problem, or at least only a trivial one that can be solved with proprietary APIs.  But what if you want to build on top of X,Y, and Z?  Well, you write code to make the user log in to each one so you can call those proprietary APIs... which means the user has to tell you their identity (and probably password) on each one... and the user has already clicked the Back button because this is complicated and annoying.

…
13 comments
Read more

The problem with creation date metadata in PDF documents

By
Last night Rachel Maddow talked about an apparently fake NSA document "leaked" to her organization.  There's a lot of info there, I suggest you listen to the whole thing:

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/maddow-to-news-orgs-heads-up-for-hoaxes-985491523709

There's a lot to unpack there but it looks like somebody tried to fool MSNBC into running with a fake accusation based on faked NSA documents, apparently based on cloning the document the Intercept published back on 6/5/2017, which to all appearances was itself a real NSA document in PDF form.

I think the main thrust of this story is chilling and really important to get straight -- some person or persons unknown is sending forged PDFs to news organization(s), apparently trying to get them to run stories based on forged documents.  And I completely agree with Maddow that she was right to send up a "signal flare" to all the news organizations to look out for forgeries.  Really, really, really import…
Post a Comment
Read more
By
Twister is interesting.  It's a decentralized "microblogging" system based on putting together existing protocols:  Bitcoin, distributed hash tables, and Bittorrent.  The most interesting part for me is using Bitcoin for user registration and spam control.  Federated systems handle this with federated trust, which is at least conceptually simple.  The Twister/Bitcoin mechanism looks intriguing though I don't know enough about Bitcoin to really comment.  Need to read further.
Post a Comment
Read more