Identity 2.0

[Dick Hardt]

On 1-Mar-06, at 2:14 PM, Johannes Ernst wrote:
> Dick,
>
> it appears to me that you are fully convinced that "pushing" of  
> identity information to relying parties is unconditionally much  
> better than "pulling", and that you indeed plan to make this one of  
> the (the?) cornerstone of a competitive case study that SXIP  
> Identity Corp. technology is so much better than what the community  
> has been developing with YADIS / OpenID / LID / i-names / XRI etc.

Johannes, why are you so antagonistic? It would be ridiculous for us  
to assume that one tech is unconditionally better then another. To  
date, the advantages of Push seem to far outweigh Pull?

> I'm baffled, because I can't see how you could possibly win this  
> argument on the merits. (the essence of which is that "pull" can  
> address all the requirements of "push" that I've seen with the  
> exact same user model, and address a number of requirements that  
> "push" cannot)

I actually see the opposite. There are numerous advantages to Push.  
But just so you don't think that I am being "unconditional", here are  
the two "advantages" of "Pull"

1)  'Pull" allows a site to get the user data whenever it wants it  
from a registry or directory. Of course, there is a protocol that  
already does this. It is called LDAP.

2) "Pull" makes it easy for a site to get public data. This is great  
for discovery data or for things like public keys. A good example of  
"Pull" is DNS.

In a prior message, I pointed out that the data security advantage  
you claimed was not really that much of an advantage. (not much  
difference between storing the data and storing how to get the data,  
with the downside that the registry needs to have much more  
complexity) -- why do you ignore these points?

> But then, if you truly believe that, please go ahead, it's far from  
> me to discourage you from that course of action or convince you of  
> the non-SXIP point of view at this point in time.

Don't worry,  you won't discourage me. To date, I have found your  
actions to be reactionary, unconstructive, with little attempt for  
understanding. But I am *still* here!

Conversely, I have been actively trying to understand what the Yadis  
community is trying to solve, since there seems to be similar overlap  
with what we are trying to solve at Sxip.