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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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Now if there were only a site to keep track of my multiple Identity Commons names.
> whole "Identity Commons idea
:)
UNTERMINATED STRING CONSTANT. My head hurts now
My other car is first.
...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.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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.
Oh, and public lynching of people who use Flash for forms (*cough* UCI Cinemas *cough*).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
i-Names Pick Up Steam
I wonder how much Valve sold it for.
Just a guy with an opinion
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.
huh? LiveJournal? Some angsty teen fearing her AOL screenname got haxored and is now Identity Commonized?!?
i-Names? Is this an Apple product?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
...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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of the primary misconceptions about i-names is that they're centralized. They're not.
Another is that 2idi is just another passport controlling your information. It isn't.
It's clear that Identity Commons and 2idi have to work on their messaging...
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
I haven't found in the FAQs or anywhere on the site what that EGS period is
...vision of an accountable, trustworthy layer on the Internet
From the FAQ: In this program, individuals may purchase a 50-year global personal i-name What isn't in the FAQ is that you are only reserving the name for 50 years and getting 2 years of free "managment services". After that management fees are around $10 a year.
Now that I have answered your question and justified leeching off of the first high rated post (chuckle) I have an important message:
IT IS A FRONT FOR TRUSTED COMPUTING AND DRM!!
IT IS A FRONT FOR TRUSTED COMPUTING AND DRM!!
IT IS A FRONT FOR TRUSTED COMPUTING AND DRM!!
The organisations involved, OASIS (oasis-open.org), XDI.ORG and the others, they are all TRUSTED COMPUTING groups creating "open standards" for ENFORCING DRIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGAMENT systems.
One of OASIS's primary projects is:
Extensible Rights Markup Language (XrML): 'The Digital Rights Language for Trusted Content and Services'.
XDI.org's FAQ
What does XDI.ORG do
This "Identity Commons" wants you to sign up and created a "Trusted Identity" (which is conviently tied to the CREDIT CARD you used to register!), and in the future DRM files will be locked to that identity, and software installations will be locked to that identity, and access to websites will be locked to that identity (single sign-on oh joy) and on and on. And they are offering you an opportunity to sign up and reserve your name before the system is fully deployed, gee thanks.
The system will not be fully operational unless you are running Microsoft's Palladium operating system, or if you are running a Palladiumized version of Linux or other operating system. Palladiumized TrustedLinux is already under construction. And these new operating systems will only work on the new TrustedHardware. IBM and HP and others are already shipping PCs with this new Trust chip. Intel has already embedded a version of the Trust chip inside the Intell Prescott, although it is in an inactive form. The expectation is that the Trust chip will soon be standard on all motherboards, and then move into the CPU itself. Intel, AMD, ARM, Transmeta, and the rest, all of the CPU makers are on board.
The Trust chip spys on your hardware and what software you are running and reports it to other people (remote attestation), the Trust chip makes it impossible to read your own files except with the approval and under the restrictions imposed by the software you were given (sealed storage), it prevents you from modifying the software on your own machine (code identity and sealed storage), the Trust chip even DEFEATS THE GPL! Having the source code and being able to modify and compile it is USELESS when that recompiled code DOES NOT WORK. The Trust chip forbids the recompiled code from access to the required encryption keys. The recompiled code will "run", but it will not WORK because it cannot read it's encrypted files and it cannot interoperate.
I know this sounds like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but IBM is already shipping ThinkCenter, ThinkVantage andNetvista desktops, and Thinkpad laptops with this chip embedded. HP/Compaq are already shipping dc7100 and D530 Desktops and nc6000,nc8000,nw8000, nc4010 notebooks with these chips embedded. Acer Veriton 3600GT/7600GT. Toshiba Tecra M2 Series. Fujitsu Lifebook S7010 and E8000 series and the T4000 Tablet PCs. Samsung all X model laptops. And more every day. As I said, the expectation is that is will soon be standard hardware on ALL motherboards.
EFF on Trusted Computing
GNU.org on Trusted Computing
Wikipedia on Trusted Computing
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
People often ask: what is the difference between your technology and Microsoft Passport?
As I like to say, the only thing good about Passport is at least you know their database won't get bought by Microsoft (because they already own it!).
In functionality - such as automatic data sharing, form filling and single sign-on - we share much with Microsoft Passport. (In fact, Passport grew out of Firefly, which is descended from my 1981 thesis on a personalized newspaper - NewsPeek - at what became soon after the M.I.T. Media Lab. I named the systems "NewsPeek" for two reasons: it provided a "peek at the news," and it was a warning that if centralized control over personal profiles existed, the future depicted in George Orwell's 1984 - where the official language was "NewSpeak" - could come true.)
But all that aside, where we differ is where it gets interesting. For one, we are decentralized. There is no single i-broker or data store that you must use. While it is true that there is only one sanctioned global registry for '=' (personal) and '@' (organizational) names, many other forms of community and peer-to-peer i-name registries can exist. It's also important to note that your data is not necessarily stored in any one place. For ease of use reasons you may choose to use a single i-broker to negotiate access to you data, but each item of your profile could conceivably be stored in a different data hosting service. (Note that current service providers that store information about you are acting as a data hosting service already.)
Another point is that, through our architecture and FOSS (free and open source software) availability of our code, we don't lock you in. Rather, you are free to move around between the i-brokers of your choosing - and even to run an i-broker yourself! We (at 2idi) are committed not only to providing you this choice, but also to providing such a compelling suite of services that i-name holders choose to have their i-names hosted at 2idi.
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins