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.

Comments

Well..

[beatdown]

Now if there were only a site to keep track of my multiple Identity Commons names.

Ahhhh!

[jrockway]

> whole "Identity Commons idea

UNTERMINATED STRING CONSTANT. My head hurts now :)

Re:What about XNS names?

[gl4ss]

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.

25$ for 50 years ?

[mirko]

But what's the point ? Being identifiable under a name which would look like this ?

Valid I-Name formats

I-names are designed to be as simple and human-friendly as possible. Global personal i-names start with an "=" sign followed by a string of characters (no spaces.) You can use letters, digits, dots ("."), and dashes ("-"), but you can't start or end with punctuation. I-names are not case-sensitive, i.e., "a" and "A" are equivalent.

See these special instructions about internationalized (Unicode) i-names.

Examples:

• =Mary
• =Jones
• =Mary.Jones
• =Mary.W.Jones
• =Mary.Wellington.Jones
• =Mary.Martha.Wellington.Jones
• =Mary.Jones.Phd
• =Mary.Jones-Smith
• =Mary.Jones.2000
• =Pickles
• =Pickle.Sandwich
• =Foo-Foo

Note that although dots are not required (i.e., you could register "=MarySmith"), the standard practice will be to separate real names with dots, just as it has become with email addresses.

For further information on i-names please visit XDI.ORG or the OASIS XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier) home page.

Central database?

[TheRaven64]

From a brief look at the site, it seems that this is yet another single sign on thing. Having my personal data stored in a single place is a good idea. That single place should be my computer (or, perhaps, a USB pen drive). The Apple Keychain (most of it is open source, and a BSD-licensed work-alike is currently number 4 on my ToDo list) is a good implementation of this. What is really needed is not another single sign-on registry, but a standard for attaching semantic information for web forms allowing the browser to autocomplete them. Safari makes some relatively good guesses, but is far from perfect.

Oh, and public lynching of people who use Flash for forms (*cough* UCI Cinemas *cough*).

Picks up Steam, eh?

[Brainboy]

i-Names Pick Up Steam

I wonder how much Valve sold it for.

Late arriving cyber real estate agent

[mabu]

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.

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 .name TLD and hasn't worked. And Microsoft has far more resources poured into their pseudo-secure give-me-all-your-personal-info "solution."

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.

Re:Poor site

[gl4ss]

/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!

Because...

[daveschroeder]

...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.

yet another flat namespace that won't scale

[keithmoore]

an unambiguous human-friendly name is an oxymoron.

Answer 50 years. BTW, THIS IS TRUSTED COMPUTING!

[Alsee]

I haven't found in the FAQs or anywhere on the site what that EGS period is

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 ...vision of an accountable, trustworthy layer on the Internet

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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