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i-Names Pick Up Steam
There's been coverage in LJ on the whole "Identity Commons idea. Basically, it's a domain registrar for your unique name - with them on sale already. ASN has published a whitepaper on the topic as well.
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...I really don't see a chance of this becoming popular, especially when it's arriving late in the game. Like it or not, the guys who thought up foo@bar.com-style addressing hit pay dirt in terms of coming up with an addressing scheme that real people could deal with.
Go somewhere random
buzzword bingo.
anyways, maybe they sold lifetime subs to their previous thing.
now they sell "As a critical part of its mission Identity Commons is offering a time-limited opportunity for individuals to register a global i-name (opens new window) for 50 years for only $25 USD.".
so.. is it going to cost more after this limited time? with all the referral shit too it's starting to sound too much like a network marketing semi-scam - with "pay now, the product may be very good in the future! you can't afford to stay away!" attitude.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
How come when Microsoft tried to do this with passport everyone thought it was evil. But now, because it's not Microsoft, there will be a lot of people saying this is good. The reason why this stuff bothers me is because I don't want to trust anyone to control all my signing on to every site. Because no matter how secure it is, if someone breaks the security, they now have access to everything. At least I know now, that if someone breaks (guesses) one of my passwords, then they've only broken one of them, and not all of them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I equate ideas like this to a late-arriving cyber real estate agent, seeking to find some creative, yet not terribly useful or practical way to divide up property that people already own.
.name TLD and hasn't worked. And Microsoft has far more resources poured into their pseudo-secure give-me-all-your-personal-info "solution."
The premise is that you pay for a pseudo-permanent identity in cyberspace. Ok, however, the TOS, like most other TOS disclaim any responsibility to consistently deliver the services you're supposedly paying for:
# Although our intention is that this service is always available, 2idi and its licensees and affiliates reserve the right to interrupt or terminate service for some unforeseen circumstance.
# Please note that amendments to this agreement, and to 2idi policies that are incorporated by reference in i-broker agreements, may be made at any time at the sole discretion of 2idi in order to best serve all members of the 2idi community.
The second part is particularly exemplative of the total and utter uselessness of schemes like this. Sure, they want to encourage you to use them as a central repository of personal information, and they allude to respecting your privacy, but they reserve the right, at any time, without your approval, to change the terms of their service, which may arbitrarily involve giving out personal info or whatever they want with whatever they have of yours.
Whenever I evaluate the value of an idea such as this, I consider to what degree the value of the project is based on a useful service, verses the degree to which the success of the project is dependent upon a) obtaining market share and b) marketing. This project fails the test. It doesn't offer anything innovative, and therefore will be marketing driven, and if it doesn't have market share, it will ultimately fail and be useless.
This is one of those markets where it's just too dangerous to fiddle with. For all the resources they invest into this effort, Google, eBay, MSN or Yahoo can pull a similar scheme out of their hat and put them out of business instantly. Spamcop already has a highly effective e-mail/spam forwarding service. The central identity thing has been tried with the
OTOH, what I do like about the basic centralized repository scheme, is that it would be better served as a way to manage and authorize legitimate SMTP servers.
/cynic mode on.
you know why it's wordy and techie? to get techies to jump in quick to register their own name(s). you're not supposed to stop and think for a second if that 25$ is a ripoff or not. the whole community 'feel'(non mega polished with flash) in it is just intended to hide what's underneath.
it's techy and named so 'commons' so that you wouldn't first think that it's a firm that's taking twenty five bucks for you to register a crappy name on it, with basically no real usage on anywhere at all!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...Microsoft would certainly tie it to payment methods (possibly creating a time when a Passport is REQUIRED to make online purchases from "partner sites"), and entrench itself everywhere, and use it as a method to hawk and secure market positions for its own products.
A hopefully open consortium of people doing universal identity (not saying this idea is necessarily it) would be doing it for the public good, not for greed or a mechanism to use a monopoly position to force its products on people.
an unambiguous human-friendly name is an oxymoron.
Just another bad idea being forced (and for money, geez) upon everyone. Just wondering, how many people are there with same names (I am one of those people, who have such names that are one in a dozen in my culture and language) who will fight for a good i-name. The other point, who on this planet would trust every online access on a single id ? Well, nobody with a sane mind would. Once found out, all your base are belong to them.
No way I am willing to be forced into such a thing and even cashing out money for such a wrong purpose.
MS's passport wasn't that good either, but at least I (we) didn't have to pay for it.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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