Many many years ago now I spent a while working on the Internet Identity management problem. In fact I have a whole category with postings I did during that period. Boy, talk about a tough problem!
Back in day one of the problems we worried about a lot went under the name “account linking.” This problem [...]
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Unsurprisingly all the driver’s licenses in the US, which are nominally issued by the states, are actually coordinated through a centralized hub. We know because it broke. I love puzzling out where these hubs are. For example there is another one for medical information, that I gather is here in Boston.
I’d be very interested to [...]
The Pew center has printed up a 50 page report on their survey results regarding online privacy and how people perceive and act upon the issue.
It’s always fun to see the category names that get manufactured for these kinds of reports. They have four:
Concerned and Careful
Worried by the Wayside
Confident Creatives
Unfazed and Inactive
I wonder what the [...]
Thursday, December 20, 2007
My thoughts keep turning to this effort by the publishers to update the robot exclusion protocol, i.e. ACAP. The current situation with the robot exclusion protocol certainly doesn’t look stable. We are going to get a revision, or substitute to that protocol. But who has the market power, the legitimacy, the [...]
End to end encryption should be the default, but it’s not. So, I find it interesting to look for the drivers that might change that. What will create strong enough demand that it will become unacceptable to ever allow any data to move thru public networks in the clear?
Fear of identity theft is one such [...]
Thursday, November 1, 2007
“Both of the antitrust authorities that we’ve dealt with say that they’re applying standard economic analysis,” Varian said. “On the basis of conventional economic analysis we think the deal should go right through.”
Ah, well that’s all right then.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Every since reading Ainslie’s “Breakdown of Will” I’ve be thinking and reading a lot about what might be called self management. I’m currenly reading “Ethics, Law and the Exercise of Self-Command.” There is a delightful quote in this essay:
Social controls play a role; the Times Literary Supplement for January 22, 1982, contained [...]
Information is the gold standard of an economic public good, but here we mean good as in trading-good rather than the black and white of good-vs-evil. There are plenty of examples (personal information, credit card numbers, passwords, trade secrets) where the flow of information drifts quickly into the gray areas. The physical world used to [...]
I like “Identity is a Story“. Story is a very nice metaphor for what most people mean when they talk about some thing’s identity. He quotes:
Rorty says in her introduction:
“Why are we interested in someone being the same person, and not merely the same human being or physical object? One reason is primarily retrospective: [...]
Digital identity systems have a natural progression. They are introduced first in applications where the individuals being identified are weak and powerless. That pays for the first copy costs, creates an installed base of craft knowledge, debugs the technology, clears questions about how to use the system in practice, sets standards. It [...]
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