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New Internet, key to identity?

From the Times:

The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card.

“As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.

A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.

Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.

That all may be true, but in the meantime, I hope we can figure out a solution that works with our current infrastructure. IPv6 is an exciting possibility though.

Mobile Phone Numbers and Identity

Despite living in SF, I still have my 617 number and use it with a little bit of pride. Whenever I trade numbers with a fellow 617er, I feel a mini connection is made.

Annoyingly, some cab companies will only take 415 numbers, so I got a forwarding number to use for these purposes.

But this post makes an excellent point: numbers are one of the things that are unlikely to change, much more so than email addresses, so why not use them more as an identifier? Coupled with the physical phone, which we pretty much always have with us, this makes an interesting combo for login.

continuations:

We are spending a lot of time thinking about how identity will play itself out on the Internet.  We are constantly running into the limitations of the existing arrangements even when companies from our portfolio are trying to collaborate.  While there is definitely movement afoot with Facebook, Google and others extending their authentication to third parties and possibly moving the OpenID standard along (see previous posts on this).

But there is also another candidate for identity at least in some situations and that is the mobile phone number.  I was reminded of that several times yesterday.  First, I met with someone who has been living in San Francisco for quite some time but still has her 917 cell number.  That made me realize that I have had my cell number for over 10 years and can’t imagine changing it voluntarily going forward.  Then I spent some time with Jeff Lawson from Twilio, which makes it super easy for web developers to add voice interaction to their services.  We talked about how IVR is often a pain, but generally that’s the case because the call starts out knowing nothing about you.  Since mobile phone numbers change so rarely, that does not have to be the case!  When I call say an airline, it should know who I am and immediately offer information directly relevant to me, such as whether my flight is on time.  A good example (surprisingly) is the New York Times, which when I call from my home phone pulls up all my information and makes reordering a missed weekend delivery a cinch.

I know that phone numbers can be spoofed via IP telephony hacks, so I am not suggesting that the mobile phone number can easily be turned into a reliable form of identity for security critical applications, but it could be used much more extensively than it is today.  This is especially true when you look at some type of multi-modal integration, such as calling in, being recognized and then being able to receive information back via SMS.

Go Ma!

A book my mom designed won the Caldecott Medal today. It’s called The House in the Night. This is the 5th book she’s designed that has won the award, which honors the best Childen’s book illustrations each year. AFAIK, that’s pretty unprecedented. Congratulations!

Even though she didn’t illustrate the book, I’ll give her a measure of credit for the award. How a book is design most certainly mediates how readers experience it, and I believe her design contributed to how the judges and other readers enjoyed the book.

In other news, the ALA announced the awards as they were happening on Twitter on @ALAyma. This excited my mother, who has to suffer through my ramblings about tech services and has heard all about the wonders of Twitter. This morning, however, I got the following email from her:

This is so much fun! Just wanted to let you know though, that Twitter failed about 3/4 of the time into the announcements. Luckily I had the video feed going on another window. Here’s the link, it won’t refresh. I must say I was surprised, I think of Twitter as low-tech and foolproof in a way.

I am about to join Facebook, one of my colleagues just put me up on her page!

Love,Mom

Check my friend Ben in the Los Angeles Times!

Here. That rules.

…Aaaaand We’re Live

I watched the inauguration at Google and one of the biggest claps (before Obama took the oath and gave his speech) was when the ABC commentator mentioned that whitehouse.gov had changed to the new administration. It doesn’t take much to get a bunch of Internet geeks excited, does it?

jakelevine:

www.whitehouse.gov