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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.
Digital Identities Now Available
Excellent! Because, you know, regular identity theft was just becoming boring.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
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?
But they don't explain anything which might make me consider them to be trustworthy.
This is a skethcy sketch, methinks.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
And for those who didn't get the subject line: Yet Another Twenty Bucks For A Record In A Database Scam
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
Ive always prefered the warm feeling of my analog identity, just like i prefer the sounds of vinyl and tubes.
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)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
...we were wondering what happened to the surviving middlemen from the B-Ark.
What's that you say? They work for "i-names" now?
"Internet sanitizers" you say? Well.... we're so delighted their safely with you.
(And not us!)
As it says a little later in the discussion, it's another twenty bucks to register yourself in someone's database.
Supposedly it gives you a permanent internet identity that could be useful for ID and shipping purposes.
See the article in Wikipedia, it has a good explanation and lots of useful links.
They've been trying to get a successful launch of this for some time now and it has so far failed miserably. I'd say it's because many folks on the internet like being anonymous or hiding behind a nym.
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
Could somebody explain wtf this is . . .
.reveal what a privacy nightmare it's going to be?
They want your money.
. .
Big. Really big. Huuuuuge.
KFG
This doesn't go as far toward an actual unique and secure identity as an x.509 certificate, isn't as flexible at handling people who have the same name, has no track record for trust or security, and is controlled by a single organization.
This looks to me like someone's way to make money fast on the interweb by having a signup race for cool names at $5 (then $20) per year each.
We know how well regulated, fair, and efficient the DNS system has been.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
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 ....
In times of trouble, the smell of frying onions usually gives confidence and comfort.
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?
[Insert pithy quote here]
Slashdot already has adverts around the sides of the stories. We don't need the stories to be adverts as well.
I like the idea of being able to give organisations revokable pointers to my details. As long as the organisation which kept the details was transparent and accountable, I'd be fairly happy about using it. Get credit card companies to use it to reduce fraud (somehow) and maybe you've even found a way to finance it: greater online security might encourage more online purchases...
The biggest flaw in the proposed scheme (if I understand it correctly) is that the reference you give each organisation is the same. Even if you can restrict access to personal information, companies can share information and put together your profile, just like a cookie only worse.
Wouldn't a better idea to use a secret key system, and each organisation can generate a request for your details which, if approved, gets signed by your secret key and returned to them. They never get your ID, so they can't profile you more than you want to be profiled. If you like, you can "delete your cookies" every 12 months.
Ideally all correspondence would also go through a level of indirection, meaning they'd never have ANY of your personal details - they'd be given a unique email alias, and a meta-address for snail mail that the postal service would recognise and treat correctly.
you mean like the other i-name sites that have all charged 20 dollars a year?
To all you who call this nothing but a database scam, ala the darknet DNS registries, you're dead wrong. i-Names is the popular name for XRI, which is an OASIS standard. Those who sell i-Names are not fly-by-nighters just trying to make a money grab. They authorized by the XRI governing body to do so, and are the exact equiavalent of a DNS registry. There are a dozen or so i-Names brokers. The entire system interoperates. Many of the i-Name brokers are also DNS registries, such as Neustar.
/.) do a little research. Yes, centralized authentication is one part of this. But there's a whole bunch more. In XRI, services are user-centric, not server-centric. i-Names have i-Numbers in a similar manner to which DNS records have IP's. iNumbers map to a particular broker's server which obey's the iName's contact restrictions, and allows a person to provide services associated with themselves as a person. These services may, for instance, be include a basic web page, and in that way would be similar to a URL. But the service might just as well be email, a VOIP address, heck a dating service even (who want's a piece of me?). The services do not replace things like email and VOIP. They abstract them. They provide a layer where you control who communicates with you and how.
XRI is an open standard, and the only such standard that there is. Saying that an "open source" free alternative will soon present itself is absolute nonsense. That's like saying, "Soon a free alternative to DNS will be available". Almost every post I have seen here is treating i-Names like some company. It's not. Stop arguing with me. You don't know what you are talking about.
I think you guys should stop shooting from the hip, and actually (I know this is asking a lot on
The key point here is that while the services may have backward compatibility bridges in place to allow interaction with the non-XRI world, they are particularly designed for comunication between two different identities, which communication is arbitrated by the rules which both parties establish. It's a new way of thinking about services on the net, and as such it's going to take you all a while to wrap your minds around it.
Don't let the similarities to MS passport scare you. Yes, there are some common ideas, but XRI goes much further, for it provides a generic framework for a wide variety of open source services, vs. a closed system which is little more than a single-sign-on.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
WTS /. User account, excellent karma, 4 digit ID. No journal entries, friends list of pro-linux advocates, many fans, no freaks.
Starting bid of $500.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs