I wrote this missive in an email thread about using CardSpace with i-names I thought I should share it with you too:

IMHO the use cases that i-names support are a super set of the use cases that cardSpace supports... All of the digital identity usecases where someone else's wants to refer to me they need to use a globally unique identifier to identify me. Now I could keep giving people (services) my email but I'd much rather give my i-name. When a party has my i-name they can bootstrap ANY functionality that I provide. This is very different from cardSpace.

CardSpace is REALLY good at doing authentication (on Vista clients). Here's where I'm going to go out on that limb... I-names aren't bound to any specific authentication mechanism, they can be used in SAML they can be used in OpenID, but they can be used in any number of other schemes as well. A managed i-card with a signed assertion from the i-broker that this i-name has been validated as belonging to this card holder seems to me to be just as valid a mechanism to authenticate an i-name as any.

Use case:

I go to Evite (the i-name enabled Evite) and say I want to invite =joe to my party. NOTE: CardSpace has no mechanism for me to identify 'Joe'; I HAVE to know a global identifier for him. Now Evite can look up =Joe's invitation SEP (could be his contact service, an email or other). Later =Joe wants to look at his invitation at Evite so he goes to the site and logs in with the convenence of the cardSpace paradigm. I don't think that using cardSpace authentication diminishes the value of the i-name in doing what it is good at doing.

So once cardSpace/higgins is broadly available we are going to need to define an attribute type so that an RP can ask for an i-name (or should it ask for an xri?). We are also going to have to provide the list of parties that should be trusted to assert i-name ownership (self asserted 'this is my i-name' should NOT be trusted); presumably XDI.org could publish that list.

So in summary... I think that people NEED i-names; they are just too useful in too many usecases. I DONT think that authentication mechanism is a good place to focus on the value of i-names, I would go as far as to say that this is one of the biggest mistakes that we in the i-name community have made. Once you have authenticated that the principle is the valid user of i-name that's where the value starts, not stops. So authenticate by whatever means the RP wants, and then look at all the cool services that can happen.

XDiggins

What is XDiggins? It’s what you get when you smash XDI and Higgins together at high speed. Last week Drummond Reed, Paul Trevithick and myself had the opportunity to get together and explore this synergy in some detail with a specific client use cases to explore.

The use cases that we were looking at were those presented by the establishment of ‘Wiser Commons’. The Wiser Commons is a group of nonprofit organizations who are willing to share information in order that all of them can provide better services and be more effective in their missions. The commons, lead by NCI and Jon Ramer of Intera, provided the excuse that Drummond, Paul and myself have been looking for, for years, to come together to try to ‘rationalize’ our various standards into a working solution.

Paul, Drummond and I spent 3 days together. The first day we spent with a small group of ‘techies’ from the commons discussing requirements. The second day we secluded ourselves and talked tech and the third day we presented a proposed initial architectural approach. Over the next couple of weeks I will dive into the details of the approach we are proposing, here on my blog, for all to see. Meanwhile, there is one main thing that is worth mentioning that I think is very exciting…. We did it!

The 3 of us finally achieved a level of understanding of each others work that we were able to build a single proposal that all three of us could agree to, endorse and understand. The single most startling thing that I came to understand is how similar our work is. Many of the ‘problems’ that we were having in understanding how Higgins and XDI should work together were not because they were incompatible but rather because they are so similar. The 2 efforts are deeply, profoundly, validatingly similar in their underlying models. There are certainly nuances that differentiate the 2 bodies of work but now that we are able to appreciate the big picture similarities we simply have plug the best-of-both together to get a working solution that transcends both and removes the necessity to choose between them.

Watch this space for upcoming details…

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.

XDI Workshop

Yesterday ooTao hosted an XDI Workshop that dove into details of i-name single sign-on (ISSO) and talked at a higher level about XDI data sharing. The slide show is available here.  The wiki that we used to publicize the workshop can now act as a place for us to continue to explore XDI implementation issues; linked from the wiki I have also setup a yahoo group for XDI developers.

YABP – Yet Another Blog Post.

I just want to point you at the work going on at YADIS. If you are interested in XDI then you should be interested in YADIS. YADIS provides capabilities discovery that is not only compatible and interoperable with the XRI specifications but shares several dependencies.  Here is a summary of the latest YADIS F2F. For the full YADIS story go here.

GR Mapping

For you implementers out there here is an excellent article written by Steve Churchill, ooTao’s CTO, that gives a concrete example of how we executed our first successful Graph/Relational mapping implementation. This implementation utilizes the plugin architecture that our XDI Like (no spec) server supports.

I fought the law...

So, I went out on a limb and coined a law a while back:

The value of a transaction between 2 parties should never be greater than the reputational collateral exposed by either party.

While at IIW2005 I had the opportunity to chat with Allan Schiffman of CommerceNet we got to talking about reputation and so I rolled out my law… he very nicely pointed out the flaw in my thinking; My law assumes that, like in the real world, people can only be in one place at a time, doing one thing at a time. My law breaks down if a user can build a $10K reputation and then enter into fraudulent $5K transactions with 100 people at the same time such that the latency of the reputation system is greater than the time needed to complete the transaction. It’s a great point.

I think this drives a change to my law but doesn’t completely invalidate it. There are 2 ways that I need to mentally adjust my thinking to accommodate this new reality;

1. Think Small. Reputation systems that are designed to operate within the size limits of workable human groups will be much more effective. For social accountability to be meaningful you need social collateral not just reputational collateral.


2. Add latency to reputational transactions that mirrors the latency of the reputational feedback mechanism. For example; when I agree to buy a laptop from you for $500 bucks you put your ‘seller’s reputation’ on the line, I get the right to effect your seller’s reputation by 100 points. That 100 points should be put ‘on-hold’ the moment that we agree to consummate the transaction and should only be freed once the transaction is completed to the satisfaction of the buyer. Another would-be buyer might now see the seller’s reputation as 400, with 100 on hold. This would reduce the latency of the system to almost 0 and limit ability for a seller to over-use their reputation. I think. This is just one way to negate the latency effect, I can think of others, it’s basically just having awareness of this problem and implementing _some_ solution to mitigate or remove the risk.

So maybe I can simply change the law to:

The value of a transaction between 2 parties should never be greater than the available reputational collateral exposed by either party taking into account the latency of the reputational feedback mechanism.

I think I need to strengthen that; I’ll work on it.

Easy is Hard

I got this quote at the bottom of an email from Luke Kanies of reductivelabs; I love it.

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are 'obviously' no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no 'obvious' deficiencies.
-- C.A.R. Hoare, Turing Lecture "The Emperor's Old Clothes" CACM
February 1981, pp. 75-83.

It makes me wonder; I have long loved the quote:

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

And have long strived for, and I believe periodically found, the simplicity on the other side of complexity. But, did I, or is it that if you stare at the same complexity long enough it starts to LOOK simple to you. When people tell me some of my work is too complex, I have to believe them, not discount their opinion because it LOOKS simple to me.

let them go, and if they love you...

I talked about this in the interview but for my own sanity need to get it down on paper. One of the arguments against giving users control of their data and control of their relationships is that businesses and organizations would ‘lose control’. There is a fear that all of an organizations members (customers) would cut them off and they would be left high and dry with no affiliations left.

First let me tell you what I mean by ‘giving the user control’:

I am using a very simple use case; rather than the organization keeping my name and my email address, they just keep my i-name. Whenever they want to contact me they look up my email address, it doesn’t matter how many times I change it, as long as I don’t revoke their permission to see it, they can get my current email. I do have the right, and the ability, to revoke permission (as I should).

Here is why I think the fear is fallacious:

The ADMA (American Direct Marketing Association) says that mailing address data ages, becomes bad, at a rate of 15% a year. I couldn’t find statistics on email address aging but you have to assume that it ages faster than mailing addresses given how much easier it is to change email address than move house. So lets assume that email data ages at a rate of 20% ( and I think that is low). So, today, an organization can expect to lose 20% a year of their relationships simply due to the inefficiencies of the infrastructure. By adopting an identity centric architecture (ICA) an organization can eliminate this attrition completely. So what about the people that ‘opt-out’; well, they weren’t interested in your stuff anyway, clearly. If over 20% per year of people that have established relationships with you jump ship; you have a deeper problem that needs to be addressed. So, the net is, you have more people, more relationships, and they are known to be of a higher quality.

I think this is profound; by respecting your constituents, and empowering them, you end up with better relationships with more people. So you save above the line because you have a more efficient information system and you make more below the line because you have more, better qualified, relationships.

Sound Byte

Aldo Castañeda interviewed me yesterday for his new series “The Story of Digital Identity::AudioArchives”. You can check it out here. I don’t think I ramble TOO much.

horse and car

I had the opportunity to spend some time at the N-TEN conference in DC this week. It was very interesting getting immersed in the world of the people that we want to adopt the stuff we are working on.  I was amazed at the ‘state-of-the-art’ that was being presented; they have a long way to go. My analogy for the day was:

They are all talking about how to better tether their horses to their carts. I tried to tell them about cars… They wanted to know how you tether a horse to a car.

The experts that were speaking were introducing the concepts of Web Services and Messaging (Pub/Sub).  I was trying to tell them that those are the OLD answers to their problems. There needs to be a real paradigm shift. It’s going to take some time, and a lot of work. The glimmer of hope; there were a few people there that really got it. Together with those few people I think we can move this stuff forward by leading by example.

Do you respect me?

As a follow on to the previous post; an interesting thing happens as the ecology evolves. When a vendor chooses to accept a given level of DSA (Data Sharing Agreement) they can (they don’t have to!!) register the fact with IDC(Identity Commons). This would enable them to get informed if that DSA was changed. It would also enable IDC to, with the vendors permission, publish a registry of vendors, or service providers, that accept that level of DSA. I could therefore choose my service provider, for any service, by searching the list of providers that are going to give me the highest level of control over my data. I think that’s cool!