Category Archives: Directory Technolgies

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McNealy on Privacy …
This links to a very good article by Scott McNealy on Privacy and Identity information. I have to agree that I believe that technology can create powerful solutions which empower people to manage their own private identity information.
I believe that one of the most difficult issues for humans is the management of their identity information. I have been working for quite some time to create a solution for easing the management burden. This, I believe, will allow us to truly gain ground in the area of privacy and digital identity …

Sun Systems’ McNealy says our privacy is safe in the hands of corporate America. Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems, has a piece in the Washington Post titled The Case Against Absolute Privacy. Basically, he suggests that our privacy is safe in the hands of corporate America, and no government regulation is needed. The benefits of open information outweigh the risks. [kuro5hin.org]

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Synchronization … and the future …
In my research into evolutionary theory, and optimal systems development, I have made the observation that replication and duplication of information is a naturally occurring solution. If we look at even our own DNA, we can see that the instructions that define the construction of our own human bodies is replicated and duplicated in every cell in our bodies.
Relating this to my research into identity, I have come to the conclusion that identity information is not going to be accessed by reference, but instead will be synchronized to all of the places that it will be used. This synchronization is key to how identity will be maintained by end-users, and the communities that they belong to.
It’s too bad that Yahoo! is dropping this service now … since they will be putting it back into place if they are going to move forward in the future of identity management …

Yahoo cuts a useful sync service. Up until recently, you could sync your Yahoo Address Book with your desktop, or PDA or mobile phone. You could use the Yahoo Yellow Pages to quickly add local businesses to your address book, and then download the results to carry around with you. It was a fantastic way to fill up your mobile phone with all the local Pizza delivery, Chinese take out, and car repair places. An real example of a online service removing a little bit of drudgery from our lives. [kuro5hin.org]

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Digital Identity: Close, but not quite far enough …
This is very good to see that a government is getting so involved in digital identity management. What they might consider is that this will end up being a voluntary process, and that many other identity storage and exchange locations are going to arise. The nice thing here is that the government is going to be verifying your identity, and will end up being the “verified identity provider” for their citizens. This is a big step in creating the true digital identity for commerce …

Dutch Propose Digital Information Safes [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

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Geographic Traceroute … and more GeoSpacial applications …
As I continue to think about the various applications that I want for my wearable computing, and navigating in physical space, I like it when I find more and more geographic location services. I saw this post yesterday:

Geographical Traceroute 0.0.4 (Default). A geographical traceroute utility for X. [freshmeat.net]

What’s really nice about this is that they are drawing from a netgeo database maintained by CAIDA. This application starts to explore the concept of distributed location servers, and the ability to query them for different types of resources. In this case, the netgeo servers are oriented towards the location of routers, and internet infrastructure. I can see where in the near future there will be more and more of these servers popping up around the Internet that will provide look-ups of almost any type of physical world resouce and it’s longitude and latitude.

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It’s really not about Instant Messaging …
I just wanted to rant a little here about the big talk about Instant Messaging … it’s not about Instant Messaging! IMHO, it’s about communications, and people wanting to communicate effectivly and efficiently. Remember folks … this is all about meme transfers and replication! All of this relates to our personal identity, and the fact that our identity is created by the conversations that we are a part of. If we evaluate the roots of personal identity, identity becomes the attributes of ourselves that we accumulate to describe ourselves, to ourselves and others. So there are several steps in personal identity which layer on top of each other.

The first of these is the accumulation of our personal identity. This accumulation then includes the people that we have in our lives … our families, friends, co-workers, and other ‘buddies’. This list of ‘contacts’ or ‘buddies’ then becomes our ‘address book’ … the list of people that we converse with. What’s powerful about AIM and ICQ is that we have this list, and also have their ‘presence’ information … or their availability. This presence and availability is what really drives Instant Messaging. I could be launching e-mail, video conferencing, or any form of communication once I have located the ‘presence’ of the other person … Instant Messaging is just one of these forms of communciations. Heck, Instant Messaging isn’t much different from what SMTP mail protocols used to be!

I am a huge fan of Jabber … it is a leading contenter in my mind, and provides a very flexible architecture for presence and communciations … including Instant Messaging. This is a good article and Jabber continues to gain ground …

Jabber As The Coming IM Standard? [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

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Way cool … an “XML Cooktop” for FREE!
This was a really good post that I found which points to a powerful tool for XML hackers. Our DirXML technology uses a variety of XML and XSLT related technologies, and this appears to be a really cool tool for editing these files. And as he says … best of all it’s free!

Are you building XML-centric sites? Check out the XML Cooktop which is a development environment for writing and testing XSLT style sheets, XML documents, DTDs, and XPATHs. Best of all it’s free! [scobleizer]