Tag: identity

If you have no control over your identity you are but a slave?

How self sovereign identity could work

Its twice I heard something similar to this now.

First time was from Gregor Žavcer at MyData 2018 in Helsinki. I remember when he started saying if you have no control over your identity you are but a slave (power-phased of course). There was a bit of awe from the audience, including myself. Now to be fair he justified everything he said but I didn’t make note of the references he made, as he was moving quite quickly. I did note down something about no autonomy is data without self.

Then today at the BBC Blueroom AI Society & the Media event, I heard Konstantinos Karachalios say something very similar. To be fair I was unsure of the whole analogy when I first heard it but there seems to be some solid grounding for this all.

This is why the very solution of a self sovereign identity (SSI) as proposed by Kaliya Young and others during Mydata speaks volume to us all deep down. The videos, notes from that session are not up yet but I gather it was all recorded and will be up soon. However I found her slides from when she talked at the decentralized web summit.

This looks incredible as we shift closer to the Dweb (I’m thinking there was web 1.0, then web 2.0 and now Dweb, as web 3.0/semantic web didn’t quite take root). There are many questions including service/application support and the difficulty of getting one. This certainly where I agree with Aral about the design of this all, the advantages could be so great but if it takes extremely good technical knowledge to get one, then its going to be stuck on the ground for a long time, regardless of the critical advantages.

I was reminded of the sad tale of what happened to Open ID, really hoping this doesn’t go the same way.

Multi-account containers for your multiple colourful identities?

Silicon Valley's lost its humanity
Mark Zuckerberg is “deluded” by his own faith in Facebook’s ability to be a force for good in the world.

I never got the chance to write about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica due to being on holiday and to be fair I wrote about them so much before.

Generally I personally think Zuckerberg’s response is just rubbish and far far too late.

Regardless, as expected GDPR was going to force their hand anyway, so they have implicated some of the changes needed to comply.

Regardless, its clear there needs to be changes we use these services if at all!

This is why I found Firefox Multi-Account Containers an interesting idea.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs that preserve your privacy. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.

Its the reason I have 4 different browsers on my laptop and 3 on my smartphone. I don’t expect it to catch on but using the paradigm of containers could be quite good for those looking to separate things out a little. However profiles never seem to catch on, but the colour thing could make it much similar.

Why the future of online dating is a bigger deal than you think

https://twitter.com/sitdowncomedian/status/924676036494798850

Mozilla Festival 2017 was great and I’m hoping to write up details as usual, but I wanted to give another pointer to Evan Prodromou for giving the session about dating on the open web.

I realize it seems trivial to people thinking only of press freedom, but romance and sexuality are a huge part of human existence. Almost all major dating sites are owned by a single company (Match.com). It’s an area that requires privacy and gradual disclosure. Open dating systems are fascinating — posting one or more profiles on the open web in a way that preserves your privacy but allows gradual disclosure and connection.

Evan’s slides had a lot in it but as there was a lot to cover, there wasn’t enough time for much discussion. On top of that, when talking about personal & sensitive topics, it sometimes takes time for people to warm up and join the discussion.

Almost 24 hours later in the same space (learning forum 2), I talked about the same subject. I started by flicking through Evan’s slides, looking at Tantek’s blog and throwing in my own thoughts about decentralised dating. As Evan said, it seems trivial to most people but it’s having a major effect on our society.

We had more discussion and although it doesn’t seem like it from the photo, had quite a few people joining. It was good to finally have that critical discussion about not just the technical make up of online dating but its good and bad effects on society and the core of our identity.

Another thing Evan started was to submit the problem space of online dating to the W3C as a community interest group. Although I couldn’t find it in the list of submitted, although he did start adding to a etherpad.

Teretulemast klubisse: Estonia e-Residency

My Estonian e-residency ID
Its really mine, no matter what my thumb is hiding

Finally while in London, I got to pick up my e-residency pack.

It was a bit of rush to get to the Embassy of Estonia as they are are only open certain times of the day. But once I got there, answered a few questions with my passport, gave up a few fingerprints and waited a bit; I was presented with my pack which included the digital identity card, USB reader, instructions and secure pin and puk numbers.

USB reader for Digital ID card

It was pretty painless and the lady behind the glass was pleasant enough on a hot sticky day.

Of course because I’m using Ubuntu, it was never going to be as straight forward as plugging it in. In the FAQ’s theres instructions to get it working on Ubuntu.

digital id card in USB reader
Of course I hid the important info, but thats the card in the USB on my Dell XPS 13.

As it was late, I decided to do it tomorrow night, as I was tired even with the espresso I had late night.

Many people have asked what I’ll do with it now I got it?

Digital signing is certainly one of my things I’ll be doing more of. I have other plans to use it for authentication, as its backed by the state of Estonia. I’m still unsure what .ee domain I should buy too. Will I setup a bank account? We shall see… Its a very interesting time to have loose ties to the EU.

Close encounters of the Guardian podcast kind

dsc_0339Someone mentioned to me about Guardian’s Close Encounter podcast series. I subscribed today and pretty much listened to the whole thing this morning and part of the afternoon. Funny enough I didn’t even have breakfast, just a some pre-packed breadsticks from last nights dinner (somebody will know what I mean, when they read this).

The podcast series is quite amazing, which is surprising because the guardian tech podcast isn’t exactly great) But I found refreshing to hear such adult talk, after the warnings at the start of each podcast. The content is certainly #nsfw (not safe for work), but I was playing it out loud in my flat. Like when I was at Futurefest earlier in the year, I certainly felt like I was listening to something so very honest, human and authentic.

Some of the topics might shock some but there’s nothing wrong with getting out of your comfort zone every once in a while.

Great work by the Guardian and I look forward to the next season. Certainly another jewel in podcasting as a medium not turning your back on.

Goodbye MyOpenID?

OpenID Logo

I received this email recently…

I wanted to reach out personally to let you know that we have made the decision to end of life the myOpenID service. myOpenID will be turned off on February 1, 2014.

In 2006 Janrain created myOpenID to fulfill our vision to make registration and login easier on the web for people. Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards. And now, billions of people who have created accounts with these services can use their identities to easily register and login to sites across the web in the way myOpenID was intended.

By 2009 it had become obvious that the vast majority of consumers would prefer to utilize an existing identity from a recognized provider rather than create their own myOpenID account. As a result, our business focus changed to address this desire, and we introduced social login technology. While the technology is slightly different from where we were in 2006, I’m confident that we are still delivering on our initial promise – that people should take control of their online identity and are empowered to carry those identities with them as they navigate the web.

For those of you who still actively use myOpenID, I can understand your disappointment to hear this news and apologize if this causes you any inconvenience. To reduce this inconvenience, we are delaying the end of life of the service until February 1, 2014 to give you time to begin using other identities on those sites where you use myOpenID today.

Speaking on behalf of Janrain, I truly appreciate your past support of myOpenID.

Sincerely,
Larry

No more myOpenID, I guess it was on the cards and to be fair its surprising its stayed open this long? Shame openid has been pretty much co-opted by the massive internet corps. The same ones which seem to do little to protect our data.

Microformating ID

Doc Searls posted a entry about Jeremy Miller's MicroID proposal. Its a Microformat as such which allows anyone to claim verifiable ownership of content they generate. You simply hash a communication ID like a email and then hash a URI of where the content will be published. Then hash the two together to generate your unique MicroID. Don't worry theres a generator on the MicroID site.

MicroID = sha1_hex( sha1_hex( “mailto:user@email.com” ) + sha1_hex( “http://website.com” ) );

The important thing to remember is that MicroID is just a way to claim ownership not a authentication. Its also very simple to add anywhere. One of the examples is to put the MicroID in your meta, which I have just done. You can also stick the Microid in a div tag using the class attribute. I'm not so keen on this method, I think semanticly it would be better if it was attached in the id attribute. But I guess it would break if you had more than piece of content from the same author in the page.

I do like the idea of generating a MicroID for every comment which gets published to a blog. Maybe this is one for the Blojsom groups.

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