Category: Personal Identity Management

The Dilemma of the OAuth Token Collector

‘Tis the season to be hacked, I guess. Twitter joined a bunch of other companies in revealing that it was the target of a sophisticated attack that may have exposed the information for about 250,000 users. While the data that was allegedly exposed, including encrypted/salted versions of passwords, was not as bad as in some

The Epic Hacking of Mat Honan and Our Identity Challenge

Wired has the kind of article that will make all of us leading highly digitized lives (is that the right term?) wake up in a cold sweat. While the title – How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking – may strike many as sensationalist, the article does a good job of

Protecting Yourself While Using Cloud Services

I was recently asked to comment on the top 5 ways to protect yourself (as an individual) when using the cloud. Obviously I brought a very identity-centric slant to it, but it was an interesting exercise as I tried to put down on paper (!) the steps I take to protect myself daily. I thought

Mission Accomplished? Not Quite…

To all those claiming victory in the nymwars, hold on to your horses and read between the lines. Nothing that has been said indicates any kind of understanding from Google on the debate over use of pseudonyms. Phrases like “the issue is technology, resources and the atmosphere the company wanted to set” sounds suspiciously like

Google+ and The Trouble With Tribbles

In a prior post I talked about the backlash against the “Real Names” policy that Google has instituted for it’s Google+ social network. The resulting nymwars are in full force, and drew me into a very interesting twitter back-and-forth between Kevin Marks, myself and Tim O’Reilly over the weekend, which Kaliya (or IdentityWoman, as she

What’s In A Name? A Lot, Actually

The “Real Names” debate has been fascinating to watch, because it such an intriguing melange of issues – social conventions, technical requirements, best practices, community responsibility – rolled into what would on the surface seem to be a very simple problem. After all, what we’re really talking about is what value to let people put

The Difference between Twitter as Utility and Twitter as IdP

The buzz, and confusion, around the Twitter-iOS integration is incredible, especially among the identirati. It’s created some very interesting twitter discussions, and some huge claims about what this means for Twitter, Apple and the social landscape in general. I’ve now seen a number of articles that equated the WWDC announcement as confirming that “Twitter is

Quick Thoughts on the Twitter-iOS Integration

One of the big announcements at yesterdays WWDC conference was the integration of Twitter into iOS 5 (those screenshots are nice!). Twitter fanatics are going gaga about this, talking about how this is a game-changer and even conjecturing on what the apparent Facebook snub means. However, what I want to know is – what does