More on identity

Dave Winer wrote a blog post titled Using DNS as a thin ID system . I encourage you to go read it, but in essence his main gripe is that the current means of identifying a person online are too complicated.
And I agree, but with a caveat: there is clearly a need for a simple identification system, while the need for (and current existence of) more complex ID systems is also there.

Winer postulates that the DNS could be used for the simple ID system. Let's call it SID for short. Here again I have to agree he's on to something, since when we designed the .tel top level domain, that was a primary goal.
However, with .tel we started by the complicated stuff, implementing all the current stuff like OpenID et. al., and also implementing a unique, original encryption system for sharing private information inside the DNS zone itself.
So now in the spirit of bootstrapping and getting something up quickly, here's my implementation of Winer's SID:

http://passw0rd.henri.tel

Here's how it works:

• Assume you don't know the above URL
• I go to your site and want to authenticate myself
• you ask me for my domain name (henri.tel) and password (passw0rd)
• you look up password.domain
• if you look up using DNS and it returns NXDOMAIN, then authentication failed
• if you look up using HTTP and it returns 404, then authentication failed

That's about it.

Oh, one more thing: inside passw0rd.henri.tel there are a number of interesting records of type NAPTR that point to my different web properties. There are also TXT records that define my name and current work. If you're looking it up via HTTP, you'll get that info in the hCard of the resulting page.

All of this, today, is available to any .tel owner, without any need for knowledge of DNS or anything beyond knowing to uncheck the "create a link" box in the below screen:

That's all there is to it.

Now the purists will say that this identification system lacks much more than it provides. I agree. If you want OpenID, my henri.tel domain is an OpenID provider as well.

But here, we're looking for a dead simple way of knowing that the person is the same person who came last week. We don't want more than that, and I think Winer's SID is something worth trying out, especially since it's pretty much universally applicable across all top level domains. (I would only use domains, because they give you good legal control in case someone tries to impersonate you, etc...)

Connecting More: People and things

We're at a cusp of a new phase of the Internet, where an extremely large set of non-computers are going to be nodes in this vast network. Those new entities will be people having their own real estate (i.e. domains), and devices that have just enough electronics to communicate in there.
I've got a post with Justin Hayward on the Telnic Blog talking about this "Internet of Things", and how the first step is necessarily discoverability: how a newly arrived node says "hello, I'm here and that's what I can give you."
I can't wait for my garden sensors to tell me that this area of the lawn is too wet and the water isn't filtering down, before the lawn turns yellow and exceedingly ugly (true story).

And another step towards iOS on Macs

Apple just released a multitouch trackpad for your macs.
This is yet another step towards replacing OS X with iOS, as I was describing in my June post entitled "The never-ending Apple Revolution".
I for one am looking forward to that new generation of operating systems being ubiquitous.

iPhone 4 light apps

There are at least 50 iPhone 4 light apps now, which have one or more of the following features: turn on/off the torchlight on the back of the phone, and strobe the torchlight.
That's it. Half of those apps cost $0.99, and probably most of the rest have ads enabled.

I thought it was pretty stupid, and I was also told the apps are slow to start up. One of them takes 5 seconds just to load up. So I felt the need to write in 2 hours a light app with strobing, including separate controls for light/dark timings of the strobe. Kind of fun. The app loads in less than 2 seconds and is well under 100kB.

If you want the source code, just let me know.
Update: I've just submitted the app to the AppStore, called "☼ Flashlight ☼"
Update 2: It's available on the app store.
Please leave a comment here in this post if you have issues or suggestions with the app. Thanks.

The "light" app in all its glory

The never-ending Apple Revolution

Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone 4, with a slew of new features and his usual hyperbole. But let's stay clear of discussing the hyperbole, which Apple fans and foes alike love to argue upon. Just the facts ma'am, and here are some hard ones.

Fact: iPhone 4 is extremely powerful, using the A4 system-on-a-chip that's also in the iPad, even though we don't know if it'll run at the same speed. Nonetheless, it's so powerful that it has literally clearly transformed the smartphone into a multipurpose handheld computer replacement: 720p hi-dev video camera, book reader on a screen with the quality of printed paper, music and video player, games machine, etc...

Fact: iPhone 4 has a front-facing camera. That's nothing new hardware-wise, but this time it comes with software that makes video-calling straightforward. Watch the operators scramble once again to increase their bandwidths.

Fact: iPhoneOS is now officially iOS (not to be confused with Cisco's IOS). It has grown up from its toddler years into adolescence: solid APIs, proven UI paradigms, runs on multiple devices, supports heavy-duty gaming and all manners of application types.

If you now ask why I consider iOS to be an adolescent, and when I'll see it grow to adulthood, my answer is simply the day you'll see Apple computers ship with iOS. It is my firm belief that Apple's iOS is its next-generation operating system across all devices, from laptops to servers and AppleTV. Think about MacBooks with dual screens, the keyboard area being replaced by a second haptic screen. The "laptop" can then be turned sideways into a "book" with two pages when you're running an ebook reader. And of course the MacBook can be sold as-is in every country in the world, no keyboard layout issues. Think about the cost savings.

Incidentally, I only keep my MacBook Pro because I can't yet run XCode to program iOS apps on the iPad. The day XCode runs on the iPad (or the iPhone+screen+bluetooth keyboard), I will never again need my trusty battered OS X 10.6 MacBook Pro.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the NeXT Step. Soon.
In the meantime, enjoy the music, book, video, mobile phone and gaming revolutions that the wizard Mr. Jobs has thrust upon us in the past decade.