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 a splendid [...]
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 [...]
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 is then resold [...]
The group I’m involved with, as my job, has released some software: Appalachian, an OpenID add-on for Firefox 2.x. It’s under a BSD style license. It helps you manage multiple OpenID, and smooth the process of logging into sites using OpenID. OpenID is a good example of a solution that has lots of benefits and [...]
Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity draws our attention to a new light weight identity solution from, your not going to believe this, 3M! I agree with Dave Wiener’s point that the emerging Internet generation treats identity in fundimentally new ways, so while this solution is not conformant with standards, on many levels, it is both [...]
Today I noticed this ad offering to reimburse you for getting a passport. $157 per adult. I felt some sympathy for the advertiser, an island in the Caribbean. A place people go for the weekend; well they used to. The island tourism folks woke up recently to discover that numbers where down and they have [...]
The HR department is administering the loyalty oath. This is annual event. We are requested to testify, via a form, to all our professional affiliations. To a degree I am, of course, joking. This invasion of our personal privacy is motivated by three concerns: concerns about possible conflict of interest (i.e. that the best interests [...]
I’ll note that much as one can use an SMS infrastructure to assert that a person has at least temporary control of a mobile phone you could use the existing notary system. A service provider prepares a document instructs the user to print it, have notarized, and return to the service provider. I wonder if [...]
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