Microid mailing list

["Chris Roos" <chrisjroos AT gmail.com>]

On 11/29/06, Eran Sandler <eran AT yedda.com> wrote:
> As far as I understand microid, there is no place in having a spider crawl
> on the web finding microids that are related to me, Eran, and figure out
> that all of this content is mine.
I agree, because there is no way to stop spoofing of microids.  I
think spidering could be used to provide clues as to what you may have
authored, but not to decide that you definitely are the author.  I
wonder if spidering becomes more of an option if you've already
verified a link with a given site, and, a third party (me or a
verifier) trusts that the site doesn't allow microid injection from
the outside (i.e. the site is responsible for generating all microids
in its pages).  This would give me some trust in spidering the site
and finding all content relating to you.  As a practical example, I
might want to aggregate all of the reviews I've written on amazon.
Assuming amazon doesn't offer this already, and that they don't allow
arbitrary microids to be inserted, I could use an aggregator to spider
amazon looking for all reviews with my microid.

> If they want to do that, let them go to my claimid.com page. My claimid.com
> page has all the necessary pages I've claimed and I stand behind them as my
> own on a given identity.
>
> As I've pointed before, having the a domain level based microid compromises
> my privacy (Use case: having two different identities on the same web site
> with the same Email address that is not publicly available on the website).
I understand this point but can't think of anytime I'd want to do
this.  Maybe you could give an explicit example?  The argument also
only holds up when talking about each page having its own microid.
What if one page has multiple microids (e.g. a forum) - if it contains
a message from each of your identities then they will still both have
the same microid.

<snipped>

Chris