Re: Federation protocols

Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
> On 1 June 2013 01:10, Mike Macgirvin <mike@macgirvin.com 
> <mailto:mike@macgirvin.com>> wrote:
>
>     I pointed this out earlier but it got lost in the interim
>     discussion - from a Red point of view, any DNS-based name is
>     transient. So we cannot easily inter-operate in your DNS-based
>     world. I am "Mike Macgirvin".  At the moment I might be located at
>     mike@zothub.com <mailto:mike@zothub.com> - tomorrow I might post
>     from george@jetson.com <mailto:george@jetson.com>; and still be
>     seen to my friends as Mike Macgirvin. If you
>     subscribe/follow/whatever either of these webfinger ids from a
>     traditional "federated social network", you'll miss many of my
>     posts, and I won't see many of yours. They're going to or from a
>     different DNS-based location. We didn't do this to be different,
>     we did this because of a clear need in our communities for such
>     mobility.
>
>
> The limitations of DNS are apparent, however it does have advantages 
> too.  Not least that it has a massive network.  It seems problematic 
> to build a social network that is not based on DNS.  It is a common 
> strategy to try and reinvent DNS, tho no one has done it yet, and I 
> suspect no one will have done it in 5 years time either. However, I 
> may have completely misunderstood your point :)
>
> As an aside, we still dont really know what webfinger is going to be, 
> it has not yet become an IETF standard and I think it's felt there are 
> some critical shortcoming, which may or may not get fixed shortly, 
> time will tell
>
>
>     Some will respond that WebID is the obvious solution - not really.
>     I don't want to carry an identity dongle with me when I'm at the
>     university in the computer lab.
>
>
> You may want to update your understanding of WebID. WebID has evolved 
> to just be about using HTTP identifiers as profiles, similar to 
> tent.io <http://tent.io>.  Dongles and other authentication methods 
> are orthogonal.

You know there are URI (and other) schemes that DON'T involve DNS or 
hostnames.  A few that come to mind:
pretty much all the URN schemes
X.500 & LDAP directories
CNRP (Common Name Resolution Protocol) - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3367
the "tag" UI scheme RFC4151
digital object identifiers (DOIs)
UUIDs

Of course they all beg the question of how to maintain a namespace, and 
then maintaining resolution infrastructure, and all those nasty issues 
of distinguishing among multiple people with the same name.






-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra

Received on Saturday, 1 June 2013 02:01:42 UTC