Digital Identities Now Available

Largecranium writes, "I-names, the only globally unique, resolvable namespace in parallel to the DNS system and compatible with OpenID, are being introduced during Digital ID World in Santa Clara. I-Names are only as useful as the services they enable; the services that are available today are interesting but not life-changing. The ones that are coming in the next 6-12 months could change the way people interact online. I-names and their value (today and tomorrow) are casually explained at iwantmynamenow.com." I-names are the lineal descendant of the technology that began as XNS and continues evolving today as XDI.

Comments

Big words make BadAnalogyGuy crosseyed

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Let's reduce this project to something simpler and more easily understood than the gibberish in the writeup.

Pay $5 to use the internet.

or

Passport.NET for money.

Either way you slice it, it's unnecessary and dumb when the alternative is free and already exists. What is the alternative? Your email address and password. On top of that, you can get virtually any email address you'd like from any number of free online webmail sites like GMale and Hotmail.

What's the point?

Re:Big words make BadAnalogyGuy crosseyed

[Shaper_pmp]

I dunno - it seems like a potentially interesting idea.

It would be useful to have a single point of contact which doesn't ever have to change. For example, for one reason or another, most people I know seem to change their e-mails or mobile numbers at least once every few years. (PEDANTS: Yes, yes, I know, you've had yours for the last three centuries. Sit down - I said "most people". I'm not talking to you.)

If you could have a system that makes that unnecessary (or at least, painless for all concerned), surely that's a good thing?

If you want to change your identity, you simply register a new i-name and let the previous one lapse.

If you want to (for example) change your e-mail address or move house you just update your info in one single place, safe in the knowledge that people can still contact you. No more phoning around banks, credit card companies, utility companies, phone/broadband companies, loyalty card companies, friends, relatives, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

If you want to avoid someone you simply revoke their privileges to read your contact info. If they happen to remember your info even so then simply change it (see above). Even better, once the infrastructure's in place you set your e-mail client/phone/whatever to check your i-name privileges before allowing the e-mail/call through each time.

The only bit that made me really itchy was the associated idea of i-numbers which are "registered to a person... and never reassigned" - why no facility to change them (eg, if they're compromised)?

However, this is only even mentioned on a third-party site, and there's no indication at all that it's a necessary or even optionally included part of what iwantmyname is doing.

Sure, if you're an uber-geek you can presently hack together a system that allows you to dump out info from a central resource (eg, a website), you can require people to log in with a unique username and password before they can see your contact info, you can present different info to different people and selectively killfile people, and you can hack together something that'll make some mail readers automatically check this resource and filter your mail accordingly, but that doesn't mean:

• It'll work well
• It'll always work (start a new corporate job which mandates using Outlook Express, and try getting that to killfile based on your hacked-up solution)
• It's within the reach of 99% of the population
• It's remotely standardised
• Anyone will be bothered to jump through the hoops you've set up to bother contacting you in the first place

I mean, even though it's possible, and even though it would save a lot of hassle when moving house/job/e-mail/phone #/whatever... how many of you have actually bothered to do it?

Sure, if they're conning $5 out of you essentially for snake-oil then by all means all throw your toys out of your prams. However, (less some important caveats) it sounds to me like an interesting proposal, which could improve life on-line immensely if you have enough control, it's secure and it becomes widespread.

Re:Big words make BadAnalogyGuy crosseyed

[Denial93]

> a single point of contact which doesn't ever have to change

Ever as in: as long as you pay $20 every year?

It doesn't make sense in any way, for customers. For people who seek to collect all data about you and are forever after a unique ID (see SSN) to organize their victi^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer database more effectively, it must seem like something really worth looking into. I reckon we are seeing a particularly blatant grab for investors money. More power to the guys who do it: stupid investors need to be burned every once in a while.

Trust / No Trust

[Sub Zero 992]

They say:

You can store your personal data (like your shipping address or your email address) at a trusted source and give access to it.

But they don't explain anything which might make me consider them to be trustworthy.
This is a skethcy sketch, methinks.

YATBFARIADS

[spectrokid]

And for those who didn't get the subject line: Yet Another Twenty Bucks For A Record In A Database Scam

New.Net?

[erig]

Why does this remind me of new.net's custom TLD registrations, that only worked if you used them as a root nameserver? (or had spyware that added that). Same thing here apparently, you register and get an "i-Name" that only works for providers that offer authentication based on it.

A permanent online identity?

[Dekortage]

The Wikipedia article on i-names says this: "One problem XRIs are designed to solve is persistent addressing -- how to maintain an address that does not need to change no matter how often the contact data for a person or organization changes."

Uhhh... I don't want persistent addressing. I like the idea that if I really wanted to, I could change my e-mail accounts or shut down my web site I have several e-mail accounts for use with different kinds of contacts: some for shopping, some for friends, some for business. I don't mix them. I don't want to mix them.

This also sounds like what Social Security Numbers have become in the U.S.: a catch-all identification number that you are asked for by every bank, employer, insurance company, hospital, car dealership, etc. I don't want to give them all my SSN. It's private, meant for government/tax purposes, but now everyone claims they need it. If I-names become popular, will something similar happen with them? (not trying to sound alarmist, just thinking out loud)

Re:Could somebody explain it?

[artson]

Sorry, that was not clear at all, was it?

I used the term nym as shorthand for pseudonym, which is defined here .

Somebody famous once said that small towns were wonderful: show up at school with a runny nose and be called sniffy for the rest of your life, fart at a picnic and be known as stinky until death. It's true.

There are a great many reasons to want to keep our names secret on the internet and most of them are logical and non-criminal. People insist on privacy as a defence against spammers, other marketers, scammers, phishers and psychopaths. People sometimes dirty their internet persona to such an extent that they'd like to start over with a new name and a fresh history. The internet is a frontier society like the old west or Australia or many parts of Africa or South America. People often left everything behind and popped up with a fresh slate.

soapbox off.

You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay or you can call me Ray_Jay or ....

Marketingspeak sounds familiar...

[Guppy06]

"The ones that are coming in the next 6-12 months could change the way people interact online."

So... we'll all be browsing on Segways?

Authentication? Verification?

[rlp]

It sounds like a single-sign-on system like Microsoft Passport (only w/o Microsoft). I didn't see any discussion of authentication. Microsoft used a central Microsoft controlled database. Companies were reluctant to allow Microsoft to be an intermediary between them and their customers. (And were more reluctant to pay another Microsoft tax). Consumers were wary of a central database of ID's controlled by Microsoft. I saw no discussion of how authentication is supposed to work with this system, or more importantly who maintains the database(s) of credentials. For that matter, I saw no discussion of verification - I register 'George.Smith' and associate it with some contact meta-data. Do they verify any of that? Can I register 'George.W.Bush' or 'Bill.Gates'? So far the site seems mostly to tout the low price. Great, it's cheap. What do I get? And why would I want it?

Advert

[kylegordon]

Slashdot already has adverts around the sides of the stories. We don't need the stories to be adverts as well.