More Adoption

It’s really starting to happen, XDI nodes are starting to spring up. This press release that went out yesterday illustrates that real businesses are seeing the value of doing this stuff ‘right’.

Another node in the XDI DataWeb

The Netgroup of University of Rome Tor Vergata have brought up an instance of the open source XDI server to further their project to develop user-centric self-reconfiguring radio equipment (E2R project)

Check out these links:

G.Bartolomeo, S. Salsano, N. Blefari-Melazzi authored the paper: "Exploiting Access Control Information in User Profiles to Reconfigure User Equipment" - International Workshop on Ubiquitous Access Control (IWUAC 06), July 17, 2006 - San Jose, California, USA
The PDF
The PPT

It’s cool stuff and very exciting for me to see people using xdi to solve real-life problems.

Week at the knees

What a week!! Not enough that it was Digital ID World so ‘everyone’ was in town. In honor of Digital ID World we ran our $5 i-name promotion. The promotion got picked up by Slashdot… and we survived, with our servers intact. We were hoping to sell 100 i-name during the promotion; we sold almost 1000. Additionally, I had some great meetings and participated in some great sessions at IOS (Identity Open Space, day one of DIDW).

It’s really starting to feel like we have pushed the ball to the top of the hill and it’s about to start rolling down the other side… It’s going to pick up size and momentum and smash into the identity silos blowing them apart (or they can open their doors and let the inevitable roll through, but once those doors are open they aren’t going to be closed again).  

…And once we have distributed identity then we can manage distributed data… XDI, here we come.

Put a LID on it

Great to see Drummond and Johannes getting together jammin’ to the XDI groove. As you may remember we did an XDI/LID integration demo about a year ago with Johannes’s help.

I Want My Name Now

I have talked lots about i-names and promised value of an abstracted global unique identifier. We are slowly but surely inching our way toward realizing that value. On Monday we will hit XDI.org’s base service compliance deadline and you will see all of the current i-name registrars (I-Brokers) offering the authentication, contact and forwarding services. If you already have an i-name be sure to go to your i-broker and configure your services so that you can start to use them.

If you don’t have an i-name yet, or if you want more, this would be a great time to jump in. In celebration of the services launch and the Digital ID World conference we are running a three day promotion that lets people buy i-names for just $5. At that price I think it’s a no-brainer to buy a name just in case these things take off. If they don’t, you’re out $5, big deal. If they do take off you’ll look like a genius. How many time’s have you wished that you’d got into the .com space earlier?

Go to www.iwantmynamenow.com on Monday, Tuesday or the first half of Wednesday to get your low cost name.

You should ph-off

Just for fun I built a FireFox plug-in to help protect OpenID users from phishing and Pharming attacks. The idea for this plug-in first came from Nat Sakimura one of the xdi.org board members and I was finally launched into action when Dick Hardt said "the solution is that we need 'something' on the client" the other week at an OpenID tech workshop. Now, I don't know if this is what Dick had in mind but it should raise the bar for a would-be phisher to succeed if it's used right.... Go on, ph-off

More on OpenID

If you are in the bay area next week... or could be... check out this 3 hour workshop that will introduce what can be done and what is being done with OpenID. David Recordon, Mr OpenID, will talk about OpenID implementation; I will talk about i-names in OpenID and, if I have time, will show a quick demo I have of simple profile sharing using XDI that uses OpenID authentication.

On another note; have you heard about the $50,000 OpenID code bounty? If not, check it out.

I-Names and OpenID

How exciting, I think I qualify as the first person to ever log into an OpenID site with an i-name. While I did have the honor of doing the first tests, I want to thank Kevin, Brian and Larry from JanRain who built the server and helped me install and configure it. I also want to thank the ooTao team, Steve, Barry and Frank who did all the work to get our i-names infrastructure to the point that the OpenID integration could work. It was an amazing collaboration of a bunch of very smart and very dedicated people.

I have to say, having typed in my OpenID url to authenticate a bunch of times, using my i-name is a really cool alternative. It’s easier to type, and the display name is a lot cleaner, it feels a lot more like a label that represents _me_.

Launch approaches and I think there are going to be a lot of these really cool ‘firsts’ with i-names. In the next days, weeks and months we are going to see a proliferation of i-brokers and i-services that embrace the user-centric vision.  I’ll let you know about these as they become available.

Back to work, lots to do for the launch on Tuesday.

Link Contracts

There are all of these lawyers running around the identity space getting involved in the technology issues... here's my revenge:

I know we are going to be talking a lot at IIW and the Berkman Conference about policy and standardization of data sharing agreements so I thought I would get this thought out of my head. This document basically says that I think we need to differentiate between several different types of agreements that need to be standardized to build a robust, dynamic, trust framework in which overlapping circles of trust can evolve. When the discussion focuses on “the data sharing agreement” I am often unclear about which one is being talked about.