<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">
<br><div><div>On 2 Jan '07, at 7:28 PM, Gabe Wachob 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="Verdana" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Verdana">It sounds to me like a lot of people are upset that somehow INames are not</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Verdana">totally decentralized. OK, I can understand that's an issue for some, but</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Verdana">for those folks working on INames, its not the primary concern... INames</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" style="font: 11.0px Verdana">picked two.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></font></div> </div></blockquote></div><br><div>That may be because <b>decentralization was a key goal of OpenID from day one</b>. The very first thing I remember reading about OpenID was Brad's initial web-page on danga.net, wherein he described OpenID as (I'm paraphrasing slightly) "an actually decentralized identity system" that "doesn't break if one site/domain goes down or turns evil". </div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Brad was, I believe, tweaking the nose of the first version of Sxip, which had recently been unveiled, and which had a single point of failure at sxip.net's DNS servers. As far as I can tell (and that's not very far, since the state of XRI/iNames documentation seems spectacularly poor*) iNames have exactly the same problem. Yes, anyone can run their own XRI resolver, but it seems that all of them bottleneck through an HTTP request to a subdomain of xri.net.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>Obviously, global namespaces have utility**, management of the root names is a natural monopoly, and root names take work to maintain and serve; all of which means that root names have monetary value. But <i>we already have a global namespace</i> in DNS. And since a global namespace is a necessary evil, you'll have to work extremely hard to convince me (and many others) that we somehow need <i>another</i> one. </div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>In particular, from my reading I do not get any sense that XRI is sufficiently superior to DNS/OpenID as to make it worthwhile. It does seem <i>somewhat</i> better, but it would have to be many times better to justify the re-invention of all these wheels. To me, it smells like earlier failed efforts such as X.500 and Xanadu, which tried to create overly complex systems that ended up not being sufficiently better (or comprehensible) to survive against the simpler protocols that won.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>--Jens</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>* I was, by coincidence, trying to find coherent docs on iNames tonight, before I found this thread in my inbox. I've been in this industry for 20 years and have read a buttload of RFCs; and usually I can make sense of a new technology. With XRI it feels like the RFC-equivalents have been mixed together, shuffled with brochures of pure marketing hype, shredded, and scattered all over creation.</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>** The iNames marketing stuff points out how simple and clear they are. And "=bob" or "=fred.smith" does seem so concise. But that only works because only a few hundred people actually have iNames so far. After a few million have been snapped up, the latecomers won't be able to get anything nearly that nice: just like AOL users, they'll be stuck with "=fredsmith226365" or "=ilikecheeeeez", and the memorability advantage is completely lost.</div></body></html>