Category: Digital Identity

  • Drowning in unmanaged personal data

    I don’t know what changed, but in recent months, I’ve started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of personal data that I have an interest in, that I’d like to keep, and that is entirely unmanaged by either me or anybody else. Here are some examples. Note they are “non-traditional” personal data in the sense…

  • We Want Root

    When you buy an iPhone, do you actually get to own it? Apple is doing its darnedest to make changes impossibe that you might want to do but that they don’t approve of, even after you paid a lot of money for the device. Does not sound like ownership to me. It wasn’t always that…

  • How GnuPG Works

    I first used GnuPG 21 years ago, to securely communicate from Germany with my US-based girlfriend at the time (who became my wife of by now 17 years). That was before the web (I discovered it in December 1993), and connectivity was over a modem, “somewhere” in the company that paid my salary. This modem…

  • The Google “Physical Web” Proposal and LID

    About ten years ago, I came up with that silly (?) idea that people could be identified with URLs. That those URLs could have particular functionality around them by which anybody — with the right permissions — could interact with them. And that, when people walked around with their mobile devices, those devices could broadcast…

  • What’s the opposite of the Web 2.0 architecture?

    Dave Winer was nice enough to respond to my question: So what do you call this architecture where your data is on your site, running the code you want, with your own terms with a full blog post titled My Architecture is called RSS.  I guess I should have seen this coming ;-) but I…