Identity
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Weekstart
Jeremiah Johnson is correct: We are ruled by underpants gnomes. Here’s the logic: Luke Kornet has a blog on Medium. And he’s strong with it. An on-point Marketoonist cartoon. Eve Maler has a book on identity coming out. It’ll be great. Eve is an IIW veteran who has earned many battle ribbons in the Identity… Continue reading
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Harbingery
On bargains even Faust wouldn't make Jamie Smith: Do you really want things to be hyper-personal…including pricing? Plus: ChatGPT gets ads, and it’s as problematic as you’d expect… and much more BTW, Abbey Stemler will speak in our salon series about “The Effects of Surveillance Pricing and How to Stop It” on Thursday, February 19th. It'll… Continue reading
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Some Pix and a Few Words About IIW
I wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019, and have been involved with IIW since I helped start it in 2005. So, in an effort to help substantiate a future Wikipedia article on IIW, I wanted a list of all my Linux Journal contributions mentioning “IIW” and/or “Internet Identity Workshop.” (Never mind that my… Continue reading
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Monday 14 July 2025
Nor did I. And mine is #5. Did you know there were 20 top identity podcasts? Anyone listening? Q: How far has our first radio broadcast spread into space? A: Eighty-nine light years. Continue reading
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Today’s Tabs
Overheard: "AI is bullshit's superpower." Big topic at IIW last week: What MCP’s Rise Really Shows: A Tale of Two Ecosystems. This may also relate: AI Agents x Law Initiative—A New Stanford and Industry Initiative Launched Yesterday. The best take on Adolescence I've seen so far. HT Dave Winer. My photos from Day One and Day Two… Continue reading
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What-Happenedings
Though it may take longer. Usually does. I say some stuff I trust will eventually prove true in Pew's Imagining the Digital Future report on being human ten years from now. Be theres. In The False Intention Economy: How AI Systems Are Replacing Human Will with Modeled Behavior, Katalin Bártfai-Walcott lays out the battlefield between the real… Continue reading
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Come from Everywhere
IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, is the UN of identity. While located in the U.S., it has always represented and welcomed the whole world to work on global problems best addressed in person. As it happens, IIW was born exactly twenty years ago tomorrow—20 March 2005—at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona. A group… Continue reading
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The Interknit
I just looked for the word “weave” among my half-million photos, and found this: We’ve been trying to solve identity problems online since the Internet showed up, roughly in the middle of the curve in the image above. It wasn’t much of a problem before then. Consider what Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of… Continue reading
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Identity as Root
This is from an email thread on the topic of digital identity, which is the twice-yearly subject* of the Internet Identity Workshop, the most leveraged conference I know. It begins with a distinction that Devon Loffreto (who is in the thread) came up with many moons ago: Self-sovereign identity is who you are, how you… Continue reading
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Burning to Write. And Vice Versa.
Among all artists, writers alone suffer the illusion that the world needs to hear what they have to say. I thought that line, or something like it, came from Rollo May, probably in The Courage to Create. But a search within that book says no. ChatGPT and Gemini both tell me May didn’t say it… Continue reading
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Laws of Identity
When digital identity ceases to be a pain in the ass, we can thank Kim Cameron and his Seven Laws of Identity, which he wrote in 2004, formally published in early 2005, and gently explained and put to use until he died late last year. Today, seven of us will take turns explaining each of… Continue reading
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The gentle lawgiver
This is about credit where due, and unwanted by the credited. I speak here of Kim Cameron, a man whose modesty was immense because it had to be, given the size of his importance to us all. See, to the degree that identity matters, and disparate systems getting along with each other matters—in both cases for… Continue reading
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Remembering Kim Cameron
Got word yesterday that Kim Cameron had passed. Hit me hard. Kim was a loving and loved friend. He was also a brilliant and influential thinker and technologist. That’s Kim, above, speaking at the 2018 EIC conference in Germany. His topics were The Laws of Identity on the Blockchain and Informational Self-Determination in a Post Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Era (in… Continue reading
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On KERI: a way not to reveal more personal info than you need to
You don’t walk around wearing a name badge. Except maybe at a conference, or some other enclosed space where people need to share their names and affiliations with each other. But otherwise, no. Why is that? Because you don’t need a name badge for people who know you—or for people who don’t. Here in civilization… Continue reading
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Let’s get #deepreal
Deepfakes are a big thing, and a bad one. On the big side, a Google search for deepfake brings up more than 23 billion results. On the bad side, today’s top result in a search on Twitter for the hashtag #deepfake says, “Technology is slowly killing reality. I am worried of tomorrow’s truths that will be made in… Continue reading
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About face
We know more than we can tell. That one-liner from Michael Polanyi has been waiting half a century for a proper controversy, which it now has with facial recognition. Here’s how he explains it in The Tacit Dimension: This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know… Continue reading
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Thoughts at #ID2020
I’m at the ID2020 (@ID2020) Summit in New York. The theme is “Rising to the Good ID Challenge.” My notes here are accumulating at the bottom, not the top. Okay, here goes… At that last link it says, “The ID2020 Alliance is setting the course of digital ID through a multi-stakeholder partnership, ensuring digital ID is responsibly implemented and… Continue reading
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A Qualified Fail
Power of the People is a great grabber of a headline, at least for me. But it’s a pitch for a report that requires filling out the form here on the right: You see a lot of these: invitations to put one’s digital ass on mailing list, just to get a report that should have… Continue reading
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The problem for people isn’t advertising, and the problem for advertising isn’t blocking. The problem for both is tracking.
In Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking, @JuliaAngwin and @ProPublica unpack what the subhead says well already: “Google is the latest tech company to drop the longstanding wall between anonymous online ad tracking and user’s names.” So here’s a message from humanity to Google and all the other spy organizations in… Continue reading
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The Adblock War Series
Here is a list of pieces I’ve written on what has come to be known as the “adblock wars.” That term applies most to #22 (written August of ’15) those that follow. But the whole series works as a coherent whole that might make a good book if a publisher is interested. Why online advertising sucks,… Continue reading