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<br><div><div>On 3 Jan '07, at 11:36 AM, Peter Davis wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Baskerville" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Baskerville">FWIW, there is nothing decentralized about openID.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It's rooted in either</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Baskerville" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Baskerville">the '.' DNS namespace (centralized), or via IANA-controlled address</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Baskerville" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Baskerville">assignments. Please explain how DNS centralization is any better or worse</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Baskerville" size="4" style="font: 14.0px Baskerville">than iNames centralization.</font></div> </div></blockquote></div><br><div>Simple: DNS is better <i>because it already exists</i>, is ubiquitously deployed/implemented/documented/understood, and is a mission-critical piece of the entire Internet as we know it. It may not be perfect, but it's pretty good, and we already depend on it for everything else we do online.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>So perhaps I should have said that OpenID is <i>incrementally decentralized</i>. It introduces no new centralized services or single points of failure. The same is not true of iNames, and I'm quite reluctant to give my support to any new protocol that relies on centralized services.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Kaliya wrote:</div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">There is more then 'one goal' in the user-centric identity community...we can all work together to get a big vision happening or we can squabble amongst ourselves...the leaders in this community chose the former thank goodness.</div></div></blockquote></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I agree; cooperation is good! I work on RSS/Atom stuff in my day job and would hate to see that kind of nastiness spread into other communities.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>I'm in this thread because I want to figure out whether iNames/XRI is something that I <i>personally</i> want to put the effort into learning and supporting. Some of my bad attitude last night stemmed from my initial excitement being thwarted by an inability to find real documentation, and the letdown of discovering creeping centralization.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I-names does not have the problems that sxip had. For starters the IP is in a public roylty free situation [...]</div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>I understand those legal and organizational differences, but the situation is still the same from the technical perspective that there is a single point of failure, so if one domain's servers go down, or their top level DNS record is hijacked, the lights go out everywhere.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Well read more and if you get a chance to talk Drummond or Andy or Gabe in person [...]</div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>To be honest, the world is so full of a number of protocols and architectures that I'm sure I could stay busy 24/7/365 reading them all. I try to read a little about a lot of things, enough to get the gist, but I'm not going to focus my energies on something unless I think it's either really good, or likely to be very successful, or both. At this point I don't see a reason to dig into XRI/iNames. If new and better-organized docs appear, that could change.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Currently, along with OpenID, the identity-related technologies that really excite me are</div><div>* Unmanaged Internet Architecture (<a href="http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/uia-osdi-abs.html)">http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/uia-osdi-abs.html)</a> </div><div>* Petnames (<a href="http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html)">http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html)</a></div><div>* YURLs (<a href="http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/Analogy/)">http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/Analogy/)</a></div><div>All of these are 100% decentralized, using DNS only as an optimization.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>--Jens</div></body></html>