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Re: PersonPort
Overheard at the Department of Technology Hype: "Passport Clone number 14, please step forward and receive your complementary basket of buzzwords..." I only seem to comment here when something you blog makes me feel crotchety, Doc. Please don't take it personally; I agree wholeheartedly with most of what you write. I only post when I have a gripe. :-) So here's a couple of characteristically crotchety thoughts for you. 1) If I don't need Passport, why on earth would I need one or more of the burgeoning "open" clones of it? Has anyone else wondered if, in such an open, fluid, decentralized medium as the net, it isn't counterproductive (pronounced: "sheer bloody lunacy") to try to impose a central "identity" authority of any kind? 2) Even if no one does think of it, and all this foolishness comes to pass, it will inevitably fail because creating one authority for anything on the net is impossible, unless you have legislative backing from the US government (i.e. ICANN, and even they're pretty shaky these days). Passport has already become the target of a miniature horde of would-be competitors, and the one potential benefit of such a service, it's claim of convenience due to being to being the "one central authority", goes right out the window when there's N possible choices of "one central authority." Passport is a bad idea, becase it is irreconcilably anti-net, just like "push media" (remember that!) was a bad idea because it was irreconcilably anti-net. We should just ignore it till it dies.
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