Upon2020 (archive)

  • What is Microsoft InfoCard?

    Slightly updated May 18 If you Google Microsoft’s InfoCard, you mostly seem to find people asking "who can tell me more about InfoCard", but very little actual answers. Here is what I’ve learned from public statements by Kim Cameron and other Microsoft people, and the public demo they did at Digital Identity World 2005. (Disclaimer:…

  • Clarifying some things about LID

    It’s quite a surprise to me to meet so many people at Digital Identity World who know what LID is, who have heard my name and even some who knew about the 4-Point Architecture that I recently blogged about. There are some frequently asked questions that I’m getting on LID that I’d like to answer…

  • The 4-Point Architecture for Distributed Software

    There is client-server software, and there is peer-to-peer software. Are these two architectures all we ever need for distributed software? I’d like to suggest that some of the world’s most successful distributed software architectures are neither client-server nor peer-to-peer when you look at them closely. They follow an architectural pattern that I’d like to call…

  • Computer-generated paper accepted at a conference I know something about

    Yesterday’s personal news highlight, for me, was that: …a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference … the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics as reported by CNN. This relates to me, for two reasons: My former boss Jürgen Bortolazzi, a prolific author of (good!)…

  • New social technologies create new social protocols

    In the olde days, parents would teach their kids when and how to take off their hat, and how to address a town notable. In the early days of the internet, we got netiquette, primarily focused on the new social technologies of e-mail and and bulletin boards, although it now seems to be largely forgotten…