Category Archives: Digital Identity Management

January 2006 CTO Breakfast

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There was a large group this morning at the CTO Breakfast arranged by
Phil Windley
. It was fun to see people from Novell (even some ex-Novell
employees) and even a friend of mine from SCO. This was probably
one of the largest groups of people that we have had at one of these
breakfasts. A good sign of interest!

Phil kicked off the conversation with a reference to a proposal in North Dakota
to float cell phone “towers” over the state using weather
balloons. I brought up a conversation from the 2005 Gilder Telecosm Conference this year where Klein Gilhousen, Co-founder; Senior Vice President, Technology,
of Qualcomm talked about the
Katrina disaster in New Orleans which left lots of people with cell phones
… with no way to call out due to the towers being down. He
talked about hanging cell towers from helicopters, and also
implementing peer-to-peer mesh networking in cell phone handsets. Cool … I just found that can hear the Klein Gilhousen Telecosm 2005 audio.

I then brought up the Pop!Tech podcast “Mind and Body” podcast from ITConversations about the coming man machine interfaces. The story of Jesse Sullivan
is an amazing thing to listen to. It details how far we have
progressed in using computer systems to monitor nerve activity for the
operation of artificial limbs. The doctor presenting talked about how
they can now move nerves from the upper arm, and split and “regrow”
them into muscle in the side of the chest. These nerves can then
be monitored … and the computer tranlates the signals into control
signals for the artificial limbs. Watch the videos in the link
above
and you’ll see how amazing the research is. The coolest part of
the conversation was when they discovered that the sensory nerves were also growing! So they can even add artificial senses to the artificial limbs!

We then got off talking about DVDs, and the growth of storage.
When I mentioned that I had seen the 320GB SATA drives at Costco for ~$179.00, Eric Smith brought up the ~$700 Buffalo Technology TeraStation
storage server that he bought. Ok … that is a cool. I
turn-key terabyte storage server for under $1000! Ok … and
where will we be in 5-10 years? When will a turn-key petabyte
storage server fall below $1000?

Bruce Grant then moved into a conversation about psuedo-AI. He is
implementing a version of the “application substrate” ideas that we
developed when we were both at SCO. The core concept is to create
a set of portable component services that can be replicated, migrated,
and connected in various ways to provide composite services. He
is now looking for ways to create emergent services … or simple ways
for the average person to define some sort of high-level goal, and have
the services create paths of connectivity automatically to create
solutions. He’s working on some very cool stuff …

The topic of “thin-client vs. thick-client” came up when someone asked
if we are about to see the turn back to “thick clients”, or to “thin
clients”. This got me thinking, and I suggested that what we are
actually watching is the natural progression of our perception
of a “thick client” until the substrate that it exists on evolves more
capacity. At this point we perceive the client as “thin”.
e.g. when we didn’t have much processing power, a browser would be
thought of as “fat” … now that we have so much processing power, AJAX
is referred to as a “thin” client. When processing and memory
evolves forward further, virtualization will continue to evolve where
running multiple entire instances of operating systems will be thought
of as “thin”! My three year old son is going to be laughing 10-15
years from now when we talk about the platform limitations that we are
experiencing now. What we perceive as a fat client today, will be seen as a background task 10 years from now.

One of the guys from Novell brought up No Machine
… a VNC-like solution for remote desktop computing. Another
person brought up what Microsoft has been working on with their UI technologies, and also the AJAX Dojo
project … all various directions that UI, remote UI, and AJAX are continuing to make distributed netowrked computing occur.

From mobile devices we got talking about child ren using them, the
user interfaces, and the way that children quickly adapt to new
experiences. We got onto the conversation about children and
computers, and that children often are more interested in the games on
DVDs then the movie content itself! They seem to be wanting the
constant interaction and challenge. I joked that eventually
children are going to want more and more
interactive media that ultimately they will realize that the most
amazing, realistic interactive media is life itself! They will realize
that
going out the front door of their house will immerse them in the
richest multimedia experience possible! Phil Burns brought up a
book called Natural Born Cyborgs where he said that this is one of the core topics of the book.

Hamachi was brought up as a
solution for encrypted peer-to-peer communications. This looks
pretty cool and appears to be yet another growing start-up on the
Internet. I always question a solution like this when it’s not
Open Source code … what am I really installing on my machine?

There are a lot more topics that were discussed … as usual too much
to write about. I have to admit that I like to see the continuing
tech culture growing here in Utah. There are more and more events
where you can find people who are in tune with what is going on in the
world and the Internet.

Phil Windley
… thanks for creating this breakfast!

Blastyx hits the net

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The other day I spent some time with Phil Burns and the guys from Blastyx. We had fun creating a quick video about some of my wireless business (80211.net)
and installation. I am still doing a lot of wireless R&D on
the side … outside of my day job at Agilix Labs. Blastyx is doing
some very cool work, and they have some very interesting ideas on where
to take next generation marketing. You can go and check out the
video … it’s the “Wireless Mountain Man” video …

Problems with style in blog posts

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I got this blog post in my aggregator (Radio) a while back and have
been meaning to post about it.  It mirrors a problem that I have
been experiencing as I have been hacking on Radio to add some new
capabilities.  This is a post from Phil Windley’s blog … and it
shows where some of the use of CSS, Classes, and Styles breakdown.

As you can see below, when I viewed the post in my aggregator it appeared like this:

Geek Dinner Tonight.

I’ll be speaking on microformats at the <a class=”hcal”
href=”javascript:showpopbox(‘blogtools:0.9-a7369493d8a334254d358837dd47669d’,
0, 20)”
id=”link_blogtools:0.9-a7369493d8a334254d358837dd47669d”>geek dinner
tonight. See you there.

What the heck?  I’m guessing that the tags and attributes are
being exposed due to some sort of issue in rendering the post, without
having something from the base web page?  I ran into something
like this when I was working to embed pictures and photos in my
posts.  I wanted to hack a simple “image inserter” button into
Radio … and when I added some really cool Javascript it worked
wonderful … until you got my post in your aggregator.

I’m working on tweaking my code so that it will work fine without the
base page … but it was taking long enough that I delayed the
project.  I’ll work on it more in the future.  It was
interesting to see that other people have the same issues with their
posts.

The weird part?  When I included Phil’s post in my post … it turned out like below!  It’s appears to be ok …

Geek Dinner Tonight.

I’ll be speaking on microformats at the geek dinner tonight. See you there.

[Phil Windley’s Technometria]

Utah Geek Dinner



November 30, 2005 @ 18:00


– 20:00

Los Hermanos, Lindon, Utah
Come and learn about microformats and meet interesting techies from around Utah.

Download to Calendar‘)
// –>

Early uploading research

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I love being alive as we approach the next singularity.  There is
so much technology research occurring, and expanding in all
directions.  Uploading is coming to a neighborhood near you. 
For those of you not familiar with concepts of uploading,
this is where computers are used to run simulations of a brain …
simulating all of the neural activity, and possibly then providing
interfacing with the real world.  In the future, this might even
be a simulation of your brain.  If it is a simulation of your brain, how much of your identity does it share with you?

So to do this, you have to scan the brain, create a neural map, then
simulate the entire neural network within a computer.  How likely
will we see something like this in our lifetime?  Well … it’s
already begun:

Blue Brain Power: Modeling the brain with a supercomputer.
Future Watch: The Blue Brain Project starts by mapping neurons in rats
to simulate brain activity in the neocortical column, and it might
eventually map the entire brain.
[Computerworld Linux News]

Progress with Asterisk

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Funny how small the world is.  I’ve been coming up to speed on the Open Source Asterisk
PBX solution.  One of the first things that you have to purchase
are the cards for the PC that connect to phone lines.  For my test
solution, I want to have two phone lines connected into the PBX to do
some basic call handling/call routing/voice mail/e-mail notification.

In reading up on this, the technical terms for what I want are FXO line cards.  These are cards that act like a modem or phone and can “answer” calls.  (NOTE: the other type of cards are FXS cards which allow you to connect a telephone to the PBX and the FXS card will “ring” the phone and provide dial-tone.)  There are several solutions out there … from cheap to quite pricey!  I found a Digium 4-line card that can have FXO or FXS modules attached to it.  For what I am doing right now … it’s too much money.

There is also a lot of talk about the Intel chipset modems that can work.  Many Asterisk web sites refer to these as the X100P or X100P-clone
cards.  These are single-line cards that are actually “modems”
with voice capabilities.  In looking into this, I saw mentions of
the $65 card … and that’s more what I was looking for.  The best
part is that I found the link to DigitNetworks and they are selling the X100P cards
for $39.99.  Even better … they are on sale this month for
$25.95!  I just picked up two of these and ought to have them in
the next day or so.

So with these two PCI cards, I’ll be able to install them into my Linux
box, and then install and configure Asterisk to use them.  This
ought to allow me to have the two lines answered – for two different
companies – and walk the caller through a series of prompts to transfer
them to the correct extension, or voice mail box.  I’ll blog more
about it as I make progress.

So why is it funny how small the world is?  It turns out that
DigitNetworks is just up the road from here in West Jordan, Utah!

The evolution of RSS

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It is very cool to see how RSS is being used for a wider range of
solutions than just blogging.  In experimenting with my iPod, I
have been studying the RSS enhancements that Apple has started to use,
and this article talks about a bunch of the enhancements that Microsoft
is experimenting with.

Where I have been thinking a lot lately is on new ways to use
RSS.  Since there are now so many news aggregator applications
that can consume RSS, it’s about time to think of new ways to create
feeds that are customized to the requestor.  And these would not
necessarily be the time-ordered “news” feeds … but maybe new forms of
reference material on demand.  What about educational content
being delivered on demand via RSS?  You simply subscribe to a
“feed” that begins to release content to you – posts or enclosures – on
a regular basis.  Your aggregator consumes the feed and presents
you with the content is more of a “chapter-order”.  At some point,
maybe there is even an extension that tells your aggregator that a feed
is now “dead” … or “finished”.

I’m thinking about how I might experiment with these Microsoft
extensions … in addition to some of the things I’m doing with my
iPod.  In the field of “identity management” I begin to think
about how I might want to give someone the ability to “subscribe” to
“me”.  I could easily do this via SSL, and then add
authentication.  People who I want to share with could then
subscribe to updates to my identity attributes.  Things like
sharing my GPS location could easily be done this way.  It’s fun
to see this whole area of technology get more and more mature.

Microsoft making RSS a two-way street.
Microsoft is creating extensions for the RSS syndication format to make
it multidirectional, a move that could allow RSS to be used to
synchronize information such as contacts and calendar entries across
different applications. [Computerworld News]

The word ‘Identity’

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I liked reading Phil’s post about the word ‘Identity’.  This is
one of the core issues surrounding the subject … the definitions and
understanding of the words.  Without a common language and lexicon
it becomes very difficult to nail down specifics on anything!

Years ago while looking into Identity I came across an article that
discussed the origins of the word … and it was a real breakthrough
for me.  From Dictionary.com, Identity is:

[French identité, from Old French identite, from Late Latin identits, from Latin idem, the
same (influenced by Late Latin essentits, being,, and identidem, repeatedly), from id, it. See i-
in Indo-European Roots.]

“Being the same as” … so the two core thoughts in this are that it is
something that is derived from observing, and it is relative or
comparative.  There is an observer who assigns you identity by
comparing you – or some aspect of you – to something else that is
known.  I believe this is the cornerstone of identity.

On the Word ‘Identity’.

On the way back from a meeting in Salt Lake this afternoon, I was
pondering the word ‘identity’ and the way it is used in the physical
world and the way we use it in the world of IT. Something I heard on
NPR set off this navel gazing–I can’t remember what. Coincidentally,
when I got to my office, I found this post from Tim Greyson on the living language of identity. And so, a post…

If I ask my wife, kids, or neighbors “what is identity?” they
answer in various ways that I think reduce, at their most basic level,
to this: “identity the sum total of who I am…my uniqueness.” It
includes not only attributes like height, eye color, and so on, but
also their personality, hopes, and dreams–everything that makes them
them. One way of sussing this out is to ask: do identity twins have
different identities? We would say yes, even when we can’t tell them
apart.

…

[Phil Windley’s Technometria]

Remote control … using your brain!

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There are many ways in which the interface between humans and computers
has evolved in recent years, however I think that the biggest jumps are
about to occur.  This article is an example of just how far things
are progressing.  We are now able to isolate specific thoughts
with electrodes placed strategically around the scalp.

My thoughts are not about how to detect thoughts of walking … but
instead how the detection of thoughts can be converted to new forms of
communications.  What if I could think
about sending a message to you, and the computer would generate an
e-mail or an SMS message to you?  I actually think that research
like this is taking us closer and closer to ‘artificial telepathy’ …
technology that will allow us to ‘think’ to each other.

Computer users move themselves with the mind.
Computer scientists have created a brain-computer interface that can
read your thoughts. It allows you to stroll down a virtual street. All
you have to do is think about walking.

The technology detects brain waves by using electrodes placed at st… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]

The Identity of Mr. Mouse

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In most of the conversations about “digital identity” we want to stick
to us humans.  How we make our lives better, easier, more secure,
more private.  There are a couple of flaws that I continue to see
in the process and thinking that, IMHO, are only going to grow and
continue to impart new pressures on our thoughts.

  • Most of the planning is being done by “old people” who have a lot invested in legacy “identity” systems.

As  part of the more “mature” component of the computer industry,
I can say that the conversations that I hear about identity are often
oriented towards solutions for people who have not had their identity
gathered and managed for them from birth.  As I wrote in my
earlier post about Tracking Identity … Cradle to Grave,
there is a whole new generation of children on this planet who will
have their identity accumulated – and available – in whole new
ways.  I believe that the digital identity management solutions
ought to consider a focus on younger generations, rather that how to
deal with legacy Internet 1.0 humans.

My analogy in this is thinking about digital music collections. 
For many people my age or older, the thought of digitizing their music
collection is a monumental task … having to find ways to encode audio
for record albums!  But for the average teen today, there is no
problem … all of their music is already digital as MP3s, or maybe
they have some CDs … which are easily ripped.  With the next
generation of humans, few will know anything but digital music, aquired
via the Internet.

If we focus all of our time looking for ways to solve the “legacy
human” problems, I’m not sure that we’ll do justice for the 2.0 and 3.0
humans coming after us.

So what is the other issue?

  • We keep thinking about humans like us … not the humans, or non-humans, of the future.

I read this article this morning on CNN:  Mice grow human cells after injections
… wow, very cool.  More work that is leading to the potential of
some very interesting life forms.  And this is only the
beginning.  Yes, I fully understand that these experiments are not
creating human-like entities today.  But this is only today. 
Where are we going to be in 10 years?

For those of you who have not read Accelerando I would suggest that
you do.  Much of the content of this book is one possible
extrapolation forward of the current day research that we are
doing.  There is already a considerable amount of thought around mind uploading, and even the personal identity of uploads. 
I started to really think about the issues of “identity of uploads”,
and even “rights of uploads” … since these are going to be the issues
facing our society in the coming years.  (What is considered the ‘murder’ of an upload?)  It’s not about if … but when.

In the CNN article about the mice, they claim that 0.1 percent of the
brain is based on human cells.  When this number increases, what
will emerge?  If not in mice (since the brain cavity might not be
able to contain enough cumulative neurons to cause emergent behaviors)
then in what strange hybrid entity might we see human-like behaviors
emerge?  When they do, will we be able to integrate these new
entities into society?  If not in physical meat-space, but in the
Internet, new forms of consious life emerge … will the various
digital identity systems being designed today take into account how to
verify their identity, and track their attributes?  Are we even thinking about these coming events?

I have another post that I want to write eventually … about the fact
that “Uploads don’t have fingerprints” … not in the same sense as we
do!

Microsoft Research and Mesh Networking

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I have been following the work that Microsoft is doing in their Windows Peer To Peer Networking. 
This is actually some very impressive technology that allows for a
distributed set of users to create peer-to-peer groups for exchanging
data and information.  I’m working on some applications (actually
plug-ins for GoBinder) that are going to exploit this
technology.  Microsoft has put together a Peer To Peer SDK allowing you to perform name-to-IP name resolution (PNRP
– a serverless DNS technology), along with graphing and grouping APIs
for the transfer of data between the peers.  It’s all very
impressive stuff … and is in all Windows XP SP2 machines … and will
be in all Vista machines.  The bottom line … this is going to
drastically alter how ad-hoc groups of users on Windows machines will
be able to locate each other, communicate, and collaborate.

Today, I found yet another amazing technology out of Microsoft Research. 
For years I have been tracking the “wireless mesh networking”
space.  This is where each node in a wireless network is a
repeater/relay for any other node that is within range.  With true
mesh technologies I can communicate with other users, even if they are
beyond the reach of my wireless signal, if there are one or more nodes
between us that are part of the “mesh” network.  Mesh networks are
the next big thing … even the cellular carriers are talking about
adding emergency mesh capabilities into cell phones.

What I found today is that Microsoft Research
has code available today that will allow you to experiment with some
pretty advanced mesh networking using your Windows XP machine! 
The Microsoft Research Networking Research Group has released their Mesh Networking software, and even an Mesh Networking Academic Resource Toolkit. 
I’ve started to go through the documentation, and so far this is a very
impressive solution.  They have embraced and extended some of the
standards that are currently being developed:

We implement ad-hoc routing and link quality measurement in a module that we
call the Mesh Connectivity Layer (MCL). Architecturally, MCL is a loadable
Microsoft Windows driver. It implements a virtual network adapter, so that to
the rest of the system the ad-hoc network appears as an additional (virtual)
network link. MCL routes using a modified version of DSR (an IETF protocol) that
we call Link Quality Source Routing (LQSR). We have modified DSR extensively to
improve its behavior, most significantly to support link quality metrics.

The MCL driver implements an interposition layer between layer 2 (the link
layer) and layer 3 (the network layer). To higher layer software, MCL appears to
be just another Ethernet link, albeit a virtual link. To lower layer software,
MCL appears to be just another protocol running over the physical link.

I am really impressed to see this work this far along.  I have
been waiting for years to see mesh networking hit the masses … and
this is now getting close.  I’m now going to upgrade some of my
wearable computers to Windows XP just to experiment with this!