Category: Web/Tech

For years, I ran my computer with my iChat/AIM Buddy List displayed. Always seemed cool to be able to see my friends online. Call it a weird sort of bonding experience.

About a week ago, as part of an anti-clutter movement on my PowerBook, I got rid of the Buddy List display. With iChat on Mac OS X, it’s an option — you can close the Buddy List window and still be “connected” via a pull down on the top menu bar of Mac OS X. In other words, you can run without your Buddy List being displayed — yet your buddies can still initiate an IM chat with you anytime. Using the same pull down menu, you can also easily set your status to avoid their interruptions when required.

What a difference a day makes. In terms of being able to focus on what you’re really trying to work on, my recent “lessons learned” are: a) shut down your Mail client while you’re trying to do real work (as Ole Eichorn told me long ago) and b) close your iChat/AIM Buddy List window. Yes, you can live without both — just as I learned to give up my old Blackberry addiction almost three years ago!

Ahhh, steps to an ecology of mind! Oh yes, getting up from the desk, taking a walk around the building every hour or so while breathing deeply, doing a few stretches, swirling some sweet water around in my mouth, soaking up the sun and appreciating the wonder of it all — really helps too!

It’s great to see Dave McClure‘s new startup SimplyHired has soft launched this week. Trying it out, I searched the job listings for PayPal — and, curiously enough, the first job posting that came back was for Dave’s old job as director of PayPal’s Developer Network! How appropriate is that!

A day after listening to Peter Wayner’s talk about using hash functions to protect data in databases, the mainstream media has picked up the story about the work of some Chinese academics identifying a weakness in the SHA-1 hash function in which a hash result might actually be shared (collide) by two different data inputs. Today’s Wall St. Journal reportsthe story on page 1.

It was such a beautiful day here today for a stroll across the Stanford campus to hear Peter Wayner give a lunch time talk at Stanford Law School on one of his favorite topics, Translucent Databases.

I’d not met Peter before — so it was fun to both meet him and hear his explanation (mostly to a group of law students and professors) about how databases might be better protected if personal information was first transformed (by one-way functions) into data that would just be junk to either inside or outside attackers.

Simson Garfinkel wrote a good article on the subject a while back that’s well worth reading for an introduction to the subject. By the way, Simson has recently made a draft of his MIT PhD thesis titled Creating Systems that are Simultaneously Usable and Secure available online.

There are a couple of good articles in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle by Benjamin Pimentel on utility computing.

It’s interesting to read about Intuit’s Quickbooks Online offering — now has about 35,000 subscribers. Intuit’s Paul Rosenfeld and his team have done a great job with that service — although it frustrates me from time to time as it still doesn’t support the Mac/Safari and is one of the few reasons I continue to have to lug around Virtual PC on my Mac. A while back Paul’s group started a weblog for the service — another nice touch!

Mark Morford of SF Gate takes aim at Microsoft for the problems users have just trying to keep their systems running cleanly.

Why the hell do people put up with this? Why is there not some massive revolt, some huge insurrection against Microsoft? Why is there not a huge contingent of furious users stomping up to Seattle with torches and scythes and crowbars, demanding the Windows Frankenstein monster be sacrificed at the altar of decent functionality and an elegant user interface?

The Liberty Alliance project is hosting an education day in Palo Alto on Monday, January 24th.

Join members and non-members Jan 24, 2005, in Palo Alto, CA. Confirmed presenters include GM, AOL, NTT Data, Neustar and Novell. Excellent opportunity to learn directly from implementers in this open, interactive format. There are three opportunities for involvement and education:

• lunch and open demo session, 11:30-1
• developer education track, 1-4:30
• business and policy makers education track, 1-4:30

One of my partners, Russ Jones, will be attending this session.

Shelley Powers takes an in-depth look at Light-Weight Identity (LID) as well as SXIP. There’s some great stuff here!

See my earlier post for a quickie overview of LID.

[Update: Phil Windley picks up the discussion — but IMHO he loses it when he starts talking about relationships (Amazon and BYU in his example). I’ll assert that most of us would actually prefer what Phil calls ‘siloed identities’. I know I would! What’s interesting about LID is that I can use pseudonyms easily to accomplish that.]

Maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age?

Today’s example: I used to listen carefully to the speeches Bill Gates gave. Felt it was important to stay up to date on what he was thinking. No more. His CES keynote is available online — who cares? Would I read a Gates’ blog? How come he didn’t distribute his keynote as a podcast via IT Conversations like everyone else does?

Do I still watch Steve Jobs’ keynotes, you ask?

Those chatting up the need to get something moving on digital identity may want to take a deeper look at Stefan Brand’s Credentica.

The best way to start a verification process is to read our white papers, which will give you a solid introduction up to the semi-technical level. After that, you can read a book on Digital Credentials published by The MIT Press; this book contains virtually all the cryptographic details, and is available for free download from this Web site.

Last month, Kim Cameron posted Stefan’s recommended reading list on identity and privacy.