Upon2020 (archive)

Recently I wrote about the difficulties of using e-mail/SMTP as a transport for Digital Identity interactions. However, these difficulties are not quite the same for instant messaging protocols such as XMPP (nee Jabber), and there are some interesting possibilities that so far haven’t been taken up by that community. In fact, I continue to be…

This is one of the most common questions I’m getting about LID. The argument goes like this: people are used to addresses that look like xxx@yyy (e-mail: for people) and those that look like http://yyy/xxx (for sites). If LID uses http URLs to identify people, won’t that confuse everybody? Well, yes, it does, but that…

Mark Wahl of Informed Control writes me saying: I also see identity management for the benefit of semi-autonomous or autonomous computing elements, beyond merely security… a lot of people tend to think of ‘individuals’ as merely individual humans. Certainly many applications will be operating for the direct benefit of their human owners, but they may…

Is Digital Identity only important to a small minority (such as these folks) who have drunk the Cool Aid, or is the Digital Identity cause inevitably going to take over the world at some time? I will try to summarize in this post why I think Digital Identity matters. It turns out there are many,…