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microid - Re: [Microid] MicroID hashing algorithm(s) and normalization

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  • From: Fred Stutzman <fred AT metalab.unc.edu>
  • To: Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter AT jabber.org>
  • Cc: microid AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Microid] MicroID hashing algorithm(s) and normalization
  • Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 15:40:40 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:


As I understood things from Jer way back when, the point of a microid is to form an association between me and you (where the URIs are stand-ins for those entities). If I am http://saint-andre.com/ (which I own) and I accept comments (which I don't), then a microid that mashes up that HTTP URI and your mailto URI (or XMPP URI or whatever) can be used on any page where you comment at my website.

Things become hazy if you are (say) http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/
(which you seem to be), because you don't own that URI -- it's owned by
blogspot, with the result that your blog is (IMHO) not a full citizen of
the Internet:

http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/2006-01.html#2006-01-13T10:07

Fred, you've spent a lot more time thinking about claims than I have,
but to my mind a microid forms an association between me and you. As Jer
once put it, it's like smearing your fingerprint on something of mine.
In the microid context that fingerprint doesn't change because it's a
relation between you and me. I think a page-specific claim is something
that we build on top of microid. Maybe we need something that is a
combination of microid plus a specific resource. So any page at
http://del.icio.us/ could have a microid that associates you with
delicious (forum, testimonial page, whatever) and that microid would
always be the same. I'm still not clear on why, but you might also want
to smear your fingerprint over http://del.icio.us/fstutzman or
http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook in a particular way, to signify
that "this is my facebooky fingerprint".

That said, I also see that there maybe value in integrating microid with
something like OpenID. You might have an OpenID provider (i.e., you
don't host your OpenID at a domain that you own because you're not a
full citizen of the Internet -- most people aren't!). So a microid that
mashes up http://saint-andre.com/ with the URL of your OpenID script
extends OpenID in an interesting way. But that's different from a
per-page microid.

The idea of a decentralized claims system is that it is arbitrary and scalable. Imagine the following scenario:

http://foo.com/profile.php?p=1
http://foo.com/profile.php?p=2

In this case, we have two pages that host the profiles of two unique users. If the MicroID is computed at the per-domain basis, how would these two users resolve their claims? I don't see how the architecture of domain-level claims would resolve this situation.

Now imagine I have two claimID-like services. In one I wish to claim my general web reputation (so I would claim http://del.icio.us/fstutzman) and in the other I wanted to claim my facebook-specific reputation (so I would claim http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook). These are both valuable points of my reputation.

However, in the system you're describing, there would be no way to issue such claims unless every microid system had a complex ruleset governing all namespaces for all websites. The MicroID verifier would have to know that http://del.icio.us/fstutzman begins the namespace, so it would have to know that http://del.icio.us/fstutzman == http://del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook. As you can see this is complex and non-scalable. People are going to have profiles or content nested in every different type of place in a page's namespace. The only way to support this is to have per-page claims.

I also am a little unclear on the you and me aspect of things. The MicroID is a claim between an individual and an entity. I wish to claim pages I have created. I don't wish to claim pages you've created, or establish your relationship to me.

I hope this makes sense. This is a very critical point - the architecture of MicroID (remaining simple and scalable) falls apart in any other case.

-F




--
Fred Stutzman
claimID.com
919-260-8508
AIM: chimprawk





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