Re: Browser UI & privacy - a discussion with Ben Laurie

Thanks for bringing my thesis up.

However, I might add that the inability to support any degree of 
privacy/anonymity/multiple identities/unlink-ability due to a dogmatic 
idea over "linking" re URIs re server-to-server connections (See 
BrowserID for a nice solution to this) and lack of a user-interface is 
one of the reasons why I doubt WebID in its current form can succeed in 
the market. I think lots of people have expressed this problem  and the 
WebID community has never modified their spec to enable these use-cases, 
and thus WebID is only appropriate to people who want to use RDF, don't 
mind the "self-signed cert" user interface, and want their public info 
on a web-page to link all their "identities" together. That is some 
group of people, I agree, but it's far from a magic bullet solution to 
identity.

  I highly doubt bringing up philosophy will actually help here unless 
you can clarify what you mean re privacy, anonymity, multiple 
identities. There was some work by the IETF in this direction that 
seemed going in the right directions:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hansen-privacy-terminology-03

I also think this discussion should be confined to its proper mailing 
list.  For example, if it simply becomes FOAF+SSL folks championing the 
wonders of RDF, then perhaps the discussion should remove other mailing 
lists than WebID. If its a philosophical discussion, then I'd keep it on 
philoweb. Or an identity discussion that's not dogmatic, keep on 
public-identity. This is basic etiquette.

    cheers,
        harry


On 10/04/2012 09:24 PM, Henry Story wrote:
> [resent as the image was too big and so stripped from the mailing
>  list, making one part of the text incomprehensible ]
>
> On 4 Oct 2012, at 17:10, Hannes Tschofenig <hannes.tschofenig@gmx.net 
> <mailto:hannes.tschofenig@gmx.net>> wrote:
>
>> Hi Melvin,
>>
>> On Oct 4, 2012, at 4:49 PM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>>
>>> I think the aim is to have an identity system that is universal. 
>>>  The web is predicated on the principle that an identifier in one 
>>> system (eg a browser) will be portable to any other system (eg a 
>>> search engine) and vice versa.  The same principle applied to 
>>> identity would allow things to scale globally.  This has, for 
>>> example, the benefit of allowing users to take their data, or 
>>> reputation footprint when them across the web.  I think there is a 
>>> focus on WebID because it is the only identity system to date 
>>> (although yadis/openid 1.0 came close) that easily allows this.  I 
>>> think many would be happy to use another system if it was global 
>>> like WebID, rather than another limited context silo.
>>
>> I think there is a lot of confusion about the difference between 
>> identifier and identity. You also seem to confuse them. 
>>
>> Here is the difference:
>>
>>   $ Identifier:   A data object that represents a specific identity of
>>      a protocol entity or individual.  See [RFC4949].
>>
>> Example: a NAI is an identifier
>>
>>   $ Identity:   Any subset of an individual's attributes that
>>      identifies the individual within a given context.  Individuals
>>      usually have multiple identities for use in different contexts.
>>
>> Example: the stuff you have at your Facebook account
>
> This is a well know distinction in philosopohy. You can refer to 
> things in two ways:
>  - with names ( identifiers )
>  - with existential variables ( anonymous names if you want ), and 
> attaching a description to that
>    thing that identifies it uniquely among all other things
>
> So for example Bertrand Russell considered that "The Present King of 
> France" in "The Present King of France is Bald" was
> not acting like a proper name, but as an existential variable with a 
> definite description. That is in
> mathematical logic he translated that phrase to:
>
>    ∃x[PKoF(x) & ∀y[PKoF(y) → y=x] & B(x)]
>
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_description
> Harry Halpin goes into this in this Philosophy of the Web Thesis
> http://journal.webscience.org/324/
> http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/thesis/
>
> So yes we know this, and understand this very well. The Semantic Web 
> is an outgrowth of
> Fregean logic, tied to the Web through URIs, and with some of the best 
> logicians
> in the world  having worked on its design. This is our bread and butter.
>
> In fact in WebID we are using this to our advantage. What we do is we use
> a URI - a universal identifier - to identify a person, in such a way 
> that it is
> tied to a definite description as "the agent ID that knows the private 
> key of public
> key Key".
>
> [ image available at:
> http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/4/49/X509-Sense-and-Reference.jpg ]
>
>
> The text in the document named "http://bblfish.net/" says:
>
> <#hjs> foaf:name "Henry Story";
>             cert:key [ a cert:RsaPublicKey; cert:modulus ... ; 
> cert:exponent ... ]
>
>
> So in the above the Identifier is "http://bblfish.net/#hjs" which 
> referes to <http://bblfish.net/#hjs>
> (me) which you can recognise as the knower of the private key
> published on the http://bblfish.net/ web page (in RDFa, in this case)
>
>>
>> To illustrate the impact for protocols let me try to explain this 
>> with OpenID Connect.
>>
>> OpenID Connect currently uses SWD (Simple Web Discovery) to use a 
>> number of identifiers to discover the identity provider, see 
>> http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html
>>
>> The identifier will also have a role when the resource owner 
>> authenticates to the identity provider. The identifier may also be 
>> shared with the relying party for authorization decisions.
>>
>> Then, there is the question of how you extract attributes from the 
>> identity provider and to make them available to the relying party. 
>
> In WebID that is easy for public info: you use HTTP GET.
> Otherwise you put protected info into protected resources, link to 
> them from the WebID profile,
> and apply WebID recursively to the people requesting information about 
> that resource. Ie: you
> protect the resources containing information that needs protecting.
>
> This makes it possible to describe people and their relations 
> extremely richly,
> and it allows one to be very fine grained in who one allows access to 
> information.
>
>
>> There, very few standards exist (this is the step that follows 
>> OAuth). The reason for the lack of standards is not that it isn't 
>> possible to standardize these protocols but there are just too many 
>> applications. A social network is different from a system that 
>> uploads data from a smart meter. Facebook, for example, uses their 
>> social graph and other services use their own proprietary "APIs" as 
>> well.
>
> Yes, I know people keep saying its impossible, and then we have 
> trouble showing them -
> since the impossible cannot be seen.
>
> Btw in WebID we use
>
> The one well know api: HTTP.
> A semantic/logic model: RDF and mappings from syntax to that model - which
> is based on Relations which I think Bertrand Russel showed to be 
> pretty much all you needed.
>
> Then it is a question of working together and developing vocabularies 
> that metastabilise.
> (More on that in a future video).
>
>>
>> This is the identity issue.
>>
>> You are mixing all these topics together. This makes it quite 
>> difficult to figure out what currently deployed systems do not provide.
>>
>> Ciao
>> Hannes
>>
>
> Social Web Architect
> http://bblfish.net/
>