{"id":201,"date":"2005-06-20T08:55:55","date_gmt":"2005-06-20T16:55:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/netmesh.info\/jernst\/uncategorized\/what-might-an-identity-meta-system-be"},"modified":"2005-06-20T08:55:55","modified_gmt":"2005-06-20T16:55:55","slug":"what-might-an-identity-meta-system-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2005\/06\/what-might-an-identity-meta-system-be\/","title":{"rendered":"What might an &#8220;Identity Meta-System&#8221; be?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft InfoCard is frequently described as an <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/library\/default.asp?url=\/library\/en-us\/dnwebsrv\/html\/identitymetasystem.asp\" target=\"_blank\">&quot;Identity Meta-System&quot;<\/a> (as opposed to, say, Microsoft Passport, which is\/was a plain identity system and not a meta-system). This term seems to have beek picked up widely, but like some others (e.g. <a href=\"http:\/\/garage.docsearls.com\/node\/605\" target=\"_blank\">Doc Searls<\/a>), the longer I think about it, the more I realize that I have a number of open questions about it &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><b>The first and most important: &quot;meta&quot; to what?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>I think I&#8217;ve heard two answers to this question so far:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>It&#8217;s &quot;meta&quot; because multiple identity providers (say, American Express, the government of Zamunda and the boy scouts) can all be identity providers, independent of each other, and all the provided identities are &mdash;technically at least&mdash; equivalent to each other.<\/p>\n<p>This contrasts with, say, Microsoft Passport, because within Passport, only Microsoft could be the identity provider, leaving American Express, Zamunda and the boy scouts unable to participate.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>It&#8217;s &quot;meta&quot; because multiple identity technologies (say, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sxip.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">SXIP<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idcommons.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">Identity Commons<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/lid.netmesh.org\/\">LID<\/a>) can all function within it: just like American Express, Zamunda and the boy scouts can be equal participants as identity providers, these projects could be equal participants as technology providers.<\/p>\n<p>This would contrast with, say, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.projectliberty.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Liberty<\/a>, because Liberty requires everybody to &quot;talk Liberty&quot; web services while InfoCard does not require that kind of thing &#8230; oops, doesn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is where I&#8217;m having trouble. The first point &mdash; multiple identity providers can plug into the same framework on an equal footing &mdash; is quite straightforward, and it&#8217;s not very hard to build such a system at all. In our very own <a href=\"http:\/\/lid.netmesh.org\/\">LID<\/a>, every owner of an identity is their own identity provider, so if we took the first point as the definition of an &quot;identity meta-system&quot;, <a href=\"http:\/\/lid.netmesh.org\/\">LID<\/a> most clearly would be such an &quot;identity meta-system&quot;. In fact, it would be the most &quot;meta&quot; of all identity meta-systems because it takes this idea to its logical extreme and makes everybody their own identity provider. So I figure if people say that InfoCard is a meta-system and LID is not, the core idea about the &quot;identity meta-system&quot; must somehow be about the second point.<\/p>\n<p>But: my problem is that I don&#8217;t see the &quot;meta&quot;-ness of InfoCard in this second respect. If Dick Hardt (of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sxip.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">SXIP<\/a>), for example, and we (with <a href=\"http:\/\/lid.netmesh.org\/\">LID<\/a>), both plugged into InfoCard, would InfoCard enable our respective technologies to interoperate so seamlessly that users think, for example, that they are using their LID to log into a website, but actually use SXIP because the website was SXIP-enabled?<\/p>\n<p>I guess I must be missing something here &#8230; (please help me along if you can &#8230;) I do understand that if we built a LID-to-InfoCard &quot;converter&quot; and if Dick built a &quot;SXIP-to-InfoCard&quot; converter (assuming for a second that this would be straightforward), the user could use either their SXIP identity or their LID to log into an InfoCard-enabled website. But that does not sounds like a &quot;meta-system&quot; to me: that&#8217;s plainly a one-to-one mapping from two existing identity systems into a third, which would be InfoCard. Of course there&#8217;s nothing wrong with such mappings, we do them all the time, it&#8217;s just that this would imply a peer relationship between InfoCard technologies and other identity technologies, rather than one of &quot;meta&quot; or &quot;backplane&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>Given this, I currently think this is where the parallels of InfoCard with TCP\/IP fall down. TCP\/IP is a meta-protocol because it requires underlying protocols, and without those, it would be nothing. For example, you can&#8217;t run TCP\/IP over Ethernet without running it on the Ethernet protocols. You can&#8217;t run TCP\/IP over dialup without the V.32 and V.90 and whatever modem protocols. Same for WiFi etc. TCP\/IP provides a common abstraction so I can connect to a remote server, for example, using a chain of underlying protocols from WiFi (laptop to base station) via dial-up (base station to ISP, for example) to Ethernet (ISP to website). But without Ethernet, modem protocols, WiFi protocols etc., TCP\/IP by itself can&#8217;t connect anything to anything.<\/p>\n<p>But InfoCard does not work that way: it&#8217;s an identity system in its own right which can very well run without the equivalent of lower-level protocols. In fact, from what I see, it does not seem to have facilities at all that allow me to use other identity protocols within it, so that I could, for example, run part of my identity interaction with a website via REST, instead of WS-* (like I can run the first leg of the TCP\/IP connection to a website over a modem if I so choose). But if InfoCard doesn&#8217;t allow me that (or am I wrong on that point?), where&#8217;s the &quot;meta&quot; part?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s only Monday morning, and I&#8217;m already really puzzled &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Microsoft InfoCard is frequently described as an &quot;Identity Meta-System&quot; (as opposed to, say, Microsoft Passport, which is\/was a plain identity system and not a meta-system). This term seems to have beek picked up widely, but like some others (e.g. Doc Searls), the longer I think about it, the more I realize that I have a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital_identity","kind-"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}