Ryan Tomayko

Dean Allen on Human Identity —

In comments related to the recent shutdown of Favrd:

I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others. Much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference (god knows we’re taught to right from the outset by caregivers: good boy, pretty picture, heckuva job Brownie), deriving personal value from these transactions in the absence of a well-formed internal frame of reference through which you can decide on your own what does and doesn’t work, and subsequently accept the opinions of others as feedback, is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.

Disco.

Zero Sign On - 1 better or Infinitely better than Single Sign On? —

This is so right. Why didn’t client certificates ever catch on in the browser? Or signed emails? Neither are hard to get set up but nobody uses it. It’s weird.

An OpenID is not an account! —

OpenID solves the identity problem, not the trust problem. When a user authenticates with OpenID, what they are doing is stating “I have the ability to prove my ownership of this URL”.