Now you've got a single point of failure, which is one of the big dangers of a system like this.
Actually, that was just an example. In reality we will more likely have identity brokers that we trust with our information, and we will tell them who gets to see what. For example, see 2idi. Also, it is important to remember that we won't have just one identity but MANY identities which will each be used in their appropriate contexts. For example a financial identity, a personal identity, a business identity, etc. Each of these will have different information associated with it, and different people will be able to see different portions of the information on different identities. The key here is that it is completely in the users control.
So actually, it is possible to do what I said in a decentralized way, albeit I admit that it would be a huge burden for the government.
Correct, although I stand by my original statement. Any identity system will be strictly voluntary, and it will only work if it gives you more privacy and not less.
Secondly, a lot of times people confuse privacy with power. For example, if my personally identifying information is leaked by a company then this is more of a power issue than a privacy one. Big companies are able to harass me, but I'm not able to harass them back proportionately. I actually publish all my personal info on my website, but when a company sells my information to another company I am still upset because of this power imbalance that it creates.
But if a voluntarily identity system was only used to track people, then why would anyone adopt it? Digital identity isn't meant for tracking. Consider the following:
Back in the horse and buggy days, people generally lived in one town their whole lives. As such, everyone knew everyone and no credentialism was needed. But with the rise of transportation technology, communities suddenly became very fluid and schools were created to act as a middleman and supply credentials. These schools weren't especially good for educating though and were by and large a waste of time. If only there were a better system.
Fast forward to the Internet. Everyone is connected to everyone, so it is just like back in the days when we all lived in a single community. Or it would be, if there were identity. So lets so currently if I drop out of college I won't be able to get a job because I have no credentials. With identity, I can be my own credential provider. For example, all of my writing on various sites around the web comes into a central dropbox just for me, and I just check the stuff I want to show off to the world and it gets dropped on my home page. Suddenly I am able to prove to job providers that I am a guy who is able to do the work.
This is actually rather ironic, because I did just drop out of college to work on these issues. I have always disliked school for various reasons and I never thought it gave me a very good education. So I read TONS of books on educational theory to see if there was something I was missing. Well it turns out our education system is actually much worse than I originally thought, albeit it is rather hard to believe. So ultimately I decided to drop out and forgo getting my credential, so that I could create a system where I could credential myself.
THAT is digital identity. This is what it's all about. Not tracking people, not selling people into slavery, but creating tools to solve your every day problems. Pretty cool, huh?
True, but then the bank can just store your number and then the government can store who that number corresponds to. That way the government can do what it has to, and the bank and other private companies are unable to store your personal information to spammers.
Actually, rule zero is really that there is no global identity management system. Kim says this several times in the video, although this point never really came through strongly enough in the laws.
This was my original post. Zonk changed it to make it more anti-Microsoft:
"Something strange is a brewin' at Microsoft these days. To see what I mean, check out this video interview with Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Architect of Identity, about Kim's now famous now famous Laws of Identity. Personally, I was so schocked to see Micrsoft come down this hard on the side of open standards and corporate responsibility that I almost choked on my tinfoil hat. Is this the beginning of a new Microsoft? But more importantly, now is the time to start an open and ongoing discussion about the future of digital identity. Is Kim's vision something the Slashdot community could get behind?"
Identity is used to protect your privacy, not to violate it. Currently, the only way your bank can know who you are is to record your name, Date of Birth, SSN, mother's maiden name, phone number, address, etc. However none of this is needed at all, the only thing that your bank needs to know is that the same person who put the money in is the same as the person who is taking it out. If we had an identity system, this would be possible. Instead of needing to enter in 20+ personal identifiers about yourself, there would be just one number and none of your other personal info would be needed.
So really your feeling of your lack privacy loss comes from not having enough identity, and not the other way around.
I wanted to get these in the original but I couldn't really fit them. First, check out Robert Scoble's home page. He is the guy who did the interview. Secondly, check out this pic posted on BoingBoing the other day that looks suspiciously similar to Kim.
Anyway this is an important issue so I highly recommend that people RTFA on this one. Basically, what it comes down to is that identity services should follow the same rules as your local S&M club: Sane, Safe, and Consensual.
It obviously requires an identity layer? News to me. As a card-carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade, I prefer anonimity.
You can have both, i.e. you can have strong identity and strong anonymity at the same time. For example, your television and coffee maker can have an identity without comprosing your personal anonymity. Furthermore, identity is only a record of your actions. You can create a record of your actions without actually tying that record to yourself. This way you give your anonymous speech more credibility without compromising your privacy.
Can I use this to train for rowing? Do squats in this suit so that I shred the crap out of my quads faster than every before, so that I can squat 450 lbs naturally by the time race day rolls around?
I know that if this would actually work, plenty of teams would pay a million dollars per unit for them. Who wants to give me a prototype to test out?
Similarly, I noticed that all the girls I'm friends with are vastly more popular than the guys I'm friends with. And it seems that as breast size increases, popularity also does. The sad thing here is that I'm not even trolling, try it for yourself.
Re:For those who don't want to RTFA, the top 10:
on
Top 10 Web Fads
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Bananaphone.
Bicycles are made illegal because children can go on the Internet and download porn.
I highly doubt the widescreen rumor is true
on
New iBooks 'Any Day Now'
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Why would Apple make a widescreen laptop? These laptops are meant for schools, which means the pricepoint they have to sell at remains basically a constant. Since the price of screens hasn't really come down since October 2004, why would Apple make a more expensive model now when they weren't willing to before? Almost everyone over school age gets the powerbook as it a prettier, albeit less durable. I highly doubt schools will be willing to shell out an extra $150 bucks for an extra inch on the monitor, which is why I think this rumor is highly unlikely to come true.
My guess is that the update will include the two finger scroll pad, the hard drive drop detection, for about 100 bucks cheaper. Since the iBook is almost as fast as the powerbook I doubt that they would make the iBook any faster for fear of cannibalizing the high end market.
I heard about a guy who supposedly invented a new type of electrolysis for hydrogen. Instead of normal electrolysis, he puts both a positive and negative at each side. Then he alternates the sets extremely fast. This causes the water molecules to go back and forth until they get so hot they just evervesce. Supposedly it uses much less energy than normal. What do you think, plausible new invention or old school con?
But don't see that as a request to post more details. If you thought I was curious about your specific product or service you were way off. It's like examining a pair of handcuffs to see which ones I'd like to wear.
Amusing. We actually use biometrics as a CAPTCHA to tell that each user as a human and they can have only one account. That way we have no reason to link a user's biomtric data to their account. It is impossible to tell a users biometrics based on their account, and it is impossible to tell a user's account based on their biometrics.
I agree completely. Who cares if the rest of the shuttle was damaged? The fact that they haven't checked whether the shuttle's vital parts are glued on tight or not is more than enough reason to cancel the launch.
Do you know, for example, that students with severe special needs take the same tests as everyone else?
I think they changed this, or are going to. Either way I have heard education industry people say that once Bush is out of the whitehouse then NCLB is as good as gone.
I'm not going to go into details here, but in my particular business all of the things you mention are impossible because of our extremely minimalist design. Rather than aggregating data about you and storing it on a server, we provide a simple but powerful tool to empower users to create their identities. It is all based on 25+ year old tried and true industry standard technology, we are just combining it in new ways to produce different outcomes. What we are doing has been done for many years for businesses, but now we are bringing it to the average consumers for a very modest monthly fee.
I use Dvorak exclusively, but I can still type on Qwerty with not too many problems. I make a lot of errors for the first 10 minutes, but after that my mind flips and I'm ready to go. Then if i switch back immediately it takes another 2-3 minutes for my mind to lock in. Now adays I really only use Qwerty when playing poker on my the PC, so I pretty much only use it to type taunts (yes, I'm "that guy"). I would highly recommend Dvorak though, it is much more comfortable for me at least and it really only takes 2-3 weeks to learn.
We have a fancy trick where there is no way that you can get someone's iris if you know their account, and there is no way you can get their account if you know their iris. In addition to using open source software, I am considering making all the data we store open to the public as well just for kicks. Personally i don't believe in trust, and especially for a system like this the only way it can work is if it is so good that you don't need to trust the people running it to keep it secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that was just an example. In reality we will more likely have identity brokers that we trust with our information, and we will tell them who gets to see what. For example, see 2idi. Also, it is important to remember that we won't have just one identity but MANY identities which will each be used in their appropriate contexts. For example a financial identity, a personal identity, a business identity, etc. Each of these will have different information associated with it, and different people will be able to see different portions of the information on different identities. The key here is that it is completely in the users control.
So actually, it is possible to do what I said in a decentralized way, albeit I admit that it would be a huge burden for the government.
Secondly, a lot of times people confuse privacy with power. For example, if my personally identifying information is leaked by a company then this is more of a power issue than a privacy one. Big companies are able to harass me, but I'm not able to harass them back proportionately. I actually publish all my personal info on my website, but when a company sells my information to another company I am still upset because of this power imbalance that it creates.
Back in the horse and buggy days, people generally lived in one town their whole lives. As such, everyone knew everyone and no credentialism was needed. But with the rise of transportation technology, communities suddenly became very fluid and schools were created to act as a middleman and supply credentials. These schools weren't especially good for educating though and were by and large a waste of time. If only there were a better system.
Fast forward to the Internet. Everyone is connected to everyone, so it is just like back in the days when we all lived in a single community. Or it would be, if there were identity. So lets so currently if I drop out of college I won't be able to get a job because I have no credentials. With identity, I can be my own credential provider. For example, all of my writing on various sites around the web comes into a central dropbox just for me, and I just check the stuff I want to show off to the world and it gets dropped on my home page. Suddenly I am able to prove to job providers that I am a guy who is able to do the work.
This is actually rather ironic, because I did just drop out of college to work on these issues. I have always disliked school for various reasons and I never thought it gave me a very good education. So I read TONS of books on educational theory to see if there was something I was missing. Well it turns out our education system is actually much worse than I originally thought, albeit it is rather hard to believe. So ultimately I decided to drop out and forgo getting my credential, so that I could create a system where I could credential myself.
THAT is digital identity. This is what it's all about. Not tracking people, not selling people into slavery, but creating tools to solve your every day problems. Pretty cool, huh?
True, but then the bank can just store your number and then the government can store who that number corresponds to. That way the government can do what it has to, and the bank and other private companies are unable to store your personal information to spammers.
Actually, rule zero is really that there is no global identity management system. Kim says this several times in the video, although this point never really came through strongly enough in the laws.
"Something strange is a brewin' at Microsoft these days. To see what I mean, check out this video interview with Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Architect of Identity, about Kim's now famous now famous Laws of Identity. Personally, I was so schocked to see Micrsoft come down this hard on the side of open standards and corporate responsibility that I almost choked on my tinfoil hat. Is this the beginning of a new Microsoft? But more importantly, now is the time to start an open and ongoing discussion about the future of digital identity. Is Kim's vision something the Slashdot community could get behind?"
So really your feeling of your lack privacy loss comes from not having enough identity, and not the other way around.
Anyway this is an important issue so I highly recommend that people RTFA on this one. Basically, what it comes down to is that identity services should follow the same rules as your local S&M club: Sane, Safe, and Consensual.
You can have both, i.e. you can have strong identity and strong anonymity at the same time. For example, your television and coffee maker can have an identity without comprosing your personal anonymity. Furthermore, identity is only a record of your actions. You can create a record of your actions without actually tying that record to yourself. This way you give your anonymous speech more credibility without compromising your privacy.
I know that if this would actually work, plenty of teams would pay a million dollars per unit for them. Who wants to give me a prototype to test out?
Similarly, I noticed that all the girls I'm friends with are vastly more popular than the guys I'm friends with. And it seems that as breast size increases, popularity also does. The sad thing here is that I'm not even trolling, try it for yourself.
Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Ring Bananaphone.
Viral memes are a hoax, pass it on.
Bicycles are made illegal because children can go on the Internet and download porn.
My guess is that the update will include the two finger scroll pad, the hard drive drop detection, for about 100 bucks cheaper. Since the iBook is almost as fast as the powerbook I doubt that they would make the iBook any faster for fear of cannibalizing the high end market.
Let's see here:
1) Four years of one of the most time intensive majors in colleges
2) Going through Microsoft's dehumanizing interview process
3) Getting free soda in exchange for 80 hour work weeks at minimum wage
4) Getting fired at age 28 for being too old
versus...
Well, anything actually.
My first ever front page article. Time to start drinking! :)
Then your mom would have a copy of my identity.
I heard about a guy who supposedly invented a new type of electrolysis for hydrogen. Instead of normal electrolysis, he puts both a positive and negative at each side. Then he alternates the sets extremely fast. This causes the water molecules to go back and forth until they get so hot they just evervesce. Supposedly it uses much less energy than normal. What do you think, plausible new invention or old school con?
But don't see that as a request to post more details. If you thought I was curious about your specific product or service you were way off. It's like examining a pair of handcuffs to see which ones I'd like to wear. Amusing. We actually use biometrics as a CAPTCHA to tell that each user as a human and they can have only one account. That way we have no reason to link a user's biomtric data to their account. It is impossible to tell a users biometrics based on their account, and it is impossible to tell a user's account based on their biometrics.
I agree completely. Who cares if the rest of the shuttle was damaged? The fact that they haven't checked whether the shuttle's vital parts are glued on tight or not is more than enough reason to cancel the launch.
I think they changed this, or are going to. Either way I have heard education industry people say that once Bush is out of the whitehouse then NCLB is as good as gone.
I'm not going to go into details here, but in my particular business all of the things you mention are impossible because of our extremely minimalist design. Rather than aggregating data about you and storing it on a server, we provide a simple but powerful tool to empower users to create their identities. It is all based on 25+ year old tried and true industry standard technology, we are just combining it in new ways to produce different outcomes. What we are doing has been done for many years for businesses, but now we are bringing it to the average consumers for a very modest monthly fee.
Email me if you are curious.
I use Dvorak exclusively, but I can still type on Qwerty with not too many problems. I make a lot of errors for the first 10 minutes, but after that my mind flips and I'm ready to go. Then if i switch back immediately it takes another 2-3 minutes for my mind to lock in. Now adays I really only use Qwerty when playing poker on my the PC, so I pretty much only use it to type taunts (yes, I'm "that guy"). I would highly recommend Dvorak though, it is much more comfortable for me at least and it really only takes 2-3 weeks to learn.
We have a fancy trick where there is no way that you can get someone's iris if you know their account, and there is no way you can get their account if you know their iris. In addition to using open source software, I am considering making all the data we store open to the public as well just for kicks. Personally i don't believe in trust, and especially for a system like this the only way it can work is if it is so good that you don't need to trust the people running it to keep it secure.