Instead of PKI

[ciphergoth]

Remember I said that PKI deserves to die?

This Clay Shirky essay states the problem with names in a really nice way (it's an independent reinvention of the ideas in this one but in clearer language)

Mark S Miller has taken the shape of the problem and shown that it's the shape of the solution! Here's how names should really be handled.

At first I thought "who would go to the effort of writing <pn>Alison</pn> all the time?" But the answer is, of course "anyone who can be bothered to write <lj user="purplerabbits">" - ie, it seems, nearly everyone who uses LJ.

This is really neat. And it's just become an essential part of my ideas on how LJ can become decentralised.

I can imagine the user interface already. You see a story that says

went to the cinema with ?Connor, who insisted we watch Spiderman.

Click on the "?Connor" and you get a little interface that tells you about the name in terms of names you already know.

* This user prefers the name Connor, but you already have a user of that name in the database (edit)
* Grant knows ?Connor as Daniel (accept)
* David knows ?Connor as Gingernuts Johnson (accept)
* Enter your own choice here _______ (accept)

[ ] Publish choice

Click on the appropriate "accept", and that name will be subsituted in that and all future appearances:

went to the cinema with Gingernuts Johnson, who insisted we watch Spiderman.

(U: replaced "?Ciaran" with "?Connor")

Update: A burst of nostalgia for the day we lost our naming innocence, just over eight years ago (and prescient words a few months earlier)

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

* This user prefers the name Ciaran, but you already have a user of that name in the database (edit)
* Grant knows ?Ciaran as Daniel (accept)
* David knows ?Ciaran as Gingernuts Johnson (accept)
* Enter your own choice here _______ (accept)

Could get horribly recursive if, say, Grant or David had other names too.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The assumption is that you already have those names in your database; in other words you've already decided to know those people by those names. People you don't know might also have names for that individual, but they wouldn't show up on your menu.

If the UI can't find anyone you've named who's named them, it might resort to looking more than one hop away for a match:

* Tom's Brian knows ?Ciaran as Malcolm (accept)

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

It's something I proposed for IRC 3. Of course, IRC 3 never happened...

IRC has many of the same problems as DNS, because nicknames are global, have to be short (because people type them), and there are thousands of users.

One day I was using two servers, because the network was really splitty. I had two different nicknames, therefore. People on different sides of the split were sending messages to different metas, but both sets of messages were combined in my ircII window. It suddenly struck me that there was no reason I couldn't be having a conversation with multiple people and multiple channels at once, but with each of them knowing me by a different name. When I joined a channel, I could have a list of suggested nicknames. The users' client software would go down the list, and pick the first one that they didn't already know someone by. If that failed, some manipulation could be used to make one of the nicknames unique.

Underneath, there would need to be a GUID. Users would never see it, though. Their software would translate GUIDs to nicknames and back transparently. If I wanted to rename someone from "Sky" to "Deb", only I would ever see it. If that person logged in via a different ISP, they'd use the same GUID, and I'd see the same nickname. There could be thousands of Debs on the network, and it would only matter if two of them wandered into the same channel.

The only problem I couldn't solve was: what happens to human-to-human communication that relies on the specific value of the name? On IRC, puns and jokes about people's nicknames are very common. A user nicknamed burma started changing the nickname to unaburma when the big Unabomber manhunt was in progress. People make Sky-related jokes on her channel all the time. meta as my nickname isn't just an arbitrary string for convenience; it was carefully chosen.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Interesting problem! A first reaction:

It seems unlikely that the problem you name can be solved. If I want a state where every "meta" I see everywhere means you, and there's to be no universally recognised authority handing out names like "meta", then other people who call themselves "meta" will have to appear to me by some other name.

I don't see many name puns on LJ - I think it's part of IRC tradition. Perhaps it's something that a secure alternative would break the same way proportional fonts break ASCII art.

Neat analogy!

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's something that a secure alternative would break the same way proportional fonts break ASCII art.

Sometimes I just love you because you're so very clever, you know...

[mhw.livejournal.com]

"anyone who can be bothered to write <lj user="purplerabbits"> ie nearly everyone who uses LJ it seems".

Actually, my client achieves that for me with Control-Alt-U.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

What, you have a special key bound to inserting "purplerabbits" in your LJ? I'm sure she'll be flattered - or worried :-)

My client doesn't do any of that kind of thing; and anyway, it doesn't take over when I'm writing responses, which is annoying (though of course very difficult to fix). But anyway, the point stands either way - users *can* be bothered to go through a little parecky in order to make names more useful, whether that's typing in markup or highlighting the name and pressing "mark as name".

heh...

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

Gingernuts johnson eh?

Mint

LOLOL

(or is it just me who finds this amusingly referenced?)