The Evolution of Digital Identity
Digital identity's wild ride from Identity 2.0 and OpenID days? Mind-blowing transformation! What started as a quirky authentication experiment now forms the invisible backbone holding our online lives together. Blink twice. The internet changed. Early frameworks? Clunky but visionary. Now we've got slick systems that actually work.
Weird, right? Zero-knowledge proofs—pure mathematical wizardry letting you prove stuff without revealing secrets. Then blockchain verification systems appeared, threading trust through inherently suspicious networks. That wasn't even conceptually possible during OpenID's heyday! Privacy meets convenience in this strange new territory. Security doesn't automatically mean frustration anymore. The old trade-offs? Reconsidered. Reimagined. Sometimes obliterated entirely. Digital identity escaped its technical ghetto. Now it's everywhere, invisible yet essential—like oxygen for our connected existence. You use it seventeen times daily without noticing. That's the real revolution.
The core stuff still matters though:
- You boss your own ID (mostly)
- Tell 'em only what they need (theoretically)
- Different masks for different tasks
- Keeping nosy providers from trailing your digital footprints
AI systems crashed the identity party with freaky new problems. Those neural nets need to check you're human without becoming creepy surveillance monsters. Tricky balance!
Got thoughts on your identity setup? Still rolling with OIDC implementations or jumped ship to something fresher? Drop your take below—the comment section awaits your digital fingerprint.
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digg this
del.icio.us thisJune 4, 2007
OpenID at Next Web
I gave a talk on Identity 2.0 at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. Although the organizers are not professional conference organizers, it was pretty wll run, and they were great hosts! The attendees where the tuned in digirati from around Europe and the presenter lineup was pretty good. My talk on identity was well received and referenced by a number of the other speakers. There seemed to be general consensus that identity is an important part of the future of the web, and the OpenID is the thought leading technology.
Presentations from emerging companies was part of the conference. Like any of these event, there was a broad spectrum of quality. The presenting companies were ranked by a couple of grumpy old men off to the side: Marc Cantor being the more grumpy of the two. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch was supposed to be there, but did not make it.
At the end of the conference, just prior to a crazy party at the Odeon, the Next Web awards were announced. We had entered Sxipper into the highly competitive beta category (Joost won). OpenID won the disruptors category, displacing Joost, Netvibes.
May 7, 2007
Sun and OpenID
Sun announced that every Sun employee now has an OpenID from openid.sun.com. It is running OpenSSO which had OpenID support added by a fellow Canadian, Paul Bryan (a Sun contractor). An interesting move by one of the leading vendors of Federation technology. Tim Bray, now of Sun points out some of the advantages of user-centric identity. Scott Kveton, Johaness Ernst, and David Recorden all blogged about it. I really another Canadian’s response. Paul Madsen’s offered $5 CDN for one of the following identifiers:
- MyOtherUriIsASamlAssertion.sun.com
- ScottMcNealy.sun.com
- YouCanTrustMeCuzImFrom.sun.com
Can you tell that Paul is part of the Liberty Mafia?!?
The press release describes Sun’s role in OpenID:
“Sun has been participating actively in the community dialogue around OpenID and related technologies, and sees great potential for OpenID’s use alongside enterprise-ready software infrastructure.”
While it is great to have another major vendor join the OpenID community, I have not seen them very active around OpenID besides telling the OpenID community that SAML does everything that OpenID does. One wonders if this is simply a reaction to Bill Gates announcement that Microsoft would support OpenID. Politics aside, this could pave the way for an industry convergence on one simple identity protocol. Details on that later!
Identity 2.0 in Germany
When I was in Mainz Germany for the Web 2.0 Kongress a couple weeks ago I did an interview with the Elektrischer Reporter. Identity is a hot topic in Germany. The first European Identity Conference started today, and I am giving a keynote tomorrow morning. The Germans seem very sensitive to invasion of privacy, which is contrasted by some moves by authorities to capture significantly more information then in other Western countries on internet usage.
The graphic below links to the German video interview — I am speaking English of course, so the interview will make some sense. It is likely more interesting to the German speakers. Of course I’m not sure about that since I don’t know what is being said and written in German!
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