[Dave Birch] I’ve been think about a recent Guardian Unlimited article that began by posing the big question: how do you cut online crime, tackle child pornography, halt crippling viruses and get rid of spam? The article then goes on to talk about a couple of research projects: researchers in the US want at least $350m (£175m) to build the Global Environment for Network Innovations (Geni) and in Europe, similar projects are under way as part of the EU’s Future and Internet Research (Fire) programme, which is expected to cost at least £27m. While this will undoubtedly be money well spent, I think that Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, cuts to the core of the issues with his comment:

There’s a real need to have better identity management, to declare your age and to know that when you’re talking to, say, Barclays bank, that you’re really doing so.

The backers of Geni are hoping that it can find answers to problems like this. It is supported by America’s National Science Foundation and has a timescale of 10-15 years. Hhhmmm. Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a professor at Rutgers University in New York, says

Once you’ve built something as large and complex as the internet it is difficult to start over again.

Quite, but do we really need to?

Technorati Tags: identity, internet, privacy

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[Dave Birch] Well I suppose I should get with on with some work, but I’ve been distracted by thinking about something else and could use some feedback. I’m preparing a presentation on the history of the technology of money, and I’ve come up with a caegorisation which seems to work, but because I made it up I’m not sure if it has any resonance. Essentially, I need to divide the history of the technology of money in three (because things always get divided into three for this sort of thing) and make some points about the dynamics with each “segment”. So here goes.

Technorati Tags: money, payments

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] If you are in the U.K. and interested in identity, it’s difficult to stay away from the subject of the national identity card, especially now that procurement is about to begin. Today I was thinking about audit. The head of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) recently said in an online webchat on the Downing Street website that most uses of the ID card will probably not involve accessing the NIR and would therefore not create an audit trail. He means “an audit trail in a central government database” because, of course, your identity card is perfectly capable of recording who has asked it for what. If you want to go home and put your ID card into your Sky box and see on the TV who interrogated your card, then you should be able to. This is quite distinct from the issue of the central audit trail, which cannot possibly work in a transparent manner. If you log on to the IPS website to see who’s been looking at your personal details, and it tells you that the police or MI5 have, then you might take that as a sign to leave the country. Perhaps as a practical experiment the government should let non-celebrity status people see who has been accessing their children’s personal details on the ContactPoint identity register for the under-16s and see how it goes.

Technorati Tags: identity

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] A very pleasant evening out at Mobile Monday in London talking about digital identity in the mobile world was made even more pleasant because Ajit was on the expert panel with me. He made a couple of points about reputation that deserved further discussion but there wasn’t time. He reminded me that Colin at Bankwatch had pointed me to this quote: “Somebody who has carved violins all his life should have more editing power than me on Wikipedia’s Stradivarius page”. A couple of months ago (but I can’t remember exactly when), I heard one of the founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, being interviewed on the BBC and he was talking about the viability (from my perspective, the desirability) of an economy founded on pseudonyms and reputation. He made complete sense, as did Ajit. I’m coming round to the view that this should be one of the expert panel topics for the forthcoming Digital Identity Forum in London on November 20th/21st.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.

[Dave Birch] This week’s podcast features Peter Brown. Peter, based in Vienna, is co-chairman of the e-government standards group set up by the European standardisation body CEN. Here he talks about the public sector approach to interoperability, crucial to the use of digital identity on a large scale, and uses the “Austrian model” to highlight some ideas in that field.

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These are the personal opinions of Consult Hyperion and its guests and should not be misunderstood as representing the opinion of its clients or suppliers. To discuss how any of the technologies discussed in this post can benefit your business, please contact Consult Hyperion.