By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenID Is Not a Provisioning Engine
Having a single login ID is one thing. Having attributes - such as an email address, or list of friends - that you transfer from one site to another is quite another. I have always thought that it would simply be a FOAF file derived from the login ID - that's one of the reasons why I made them URLs, and not, say, unique identifiers. If a user logged in as 'downes.livejournal.com' then their attributes should be found in 'downes.livejournal.com/foaf.xml'. But OpenID does it as a request-response style interaction. That's way too much overhead for something so simple. I think that the reason this hasn't prevailed is that people want to control who gets what attribute. My response to this is: have different identities. That's why mIDm proposed to put them in a dropdown list in the browser. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. First Asus Eee PC's On Sale Today
Major competition for OLPC is now on the market. Christoph Derndorfer takes a closer look at the impact of the Asus on OLPC. "As previously highlighted in Wayan's story the main differences between the various models are the size of the RAM (256MB to 1GB), the size of the flash mass-storage (2GB to 8GB), the camera and the batteries. Compare that to the OLPC project and its "one size fits all" approach and you'll realize that Asus offers more choice, both in terms of the hardware and the price per unit". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OSIS User-Centric Identity Interop at Catalyst Europe 2007
Fascinating set of test results posted to a wiki comparing user-centric access systems for interoperability. Worth noting (in my mind) is the way Shibboleth seems totally out of place here, and also the "issues" SxIP has with OpenID. Also, Scott Wilson flags MyOpenID's support for InfoCards. But before drawing any conclusions, it should be noted that these are very preliminary results for a very untested technology. Via Scott Wilson.

Related: Tom Hoffman ponders on some meandering remarks from Jeff Utecht (Hoffman is very tongue-in-cheek, I would say, especially while discussing ODBC). Still, what he says here is worth noting: "What you really want are API's that allow the two applications to talk to each other as peer applications, respecting each application's programming and business logic, rather than plunging their dirty fingers into each other's databases without asking... So... what Web Services are widely (at all) used in K-12 enterprise apps, in the US, at least? Ug... SIF. To say I have a love/hate relationship with SIF would be an overstatement. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why Does My Feedburner Subscriber Count Fluctuate?
People who think they need a service like Feedburner in order to know how many people are subscribing to their RSS feeds should be aware that RSS aggregator services these days are reporting, as part of their 'user agent' description, the number of subscribers to a given feed. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Teaching with Tech: Does It Work?
Another one of those articles saying that, since using technology to the exclusion of all else results in bad habits, technology use should be sharply limited or eliminated altogether. The focus is on Tom Oppenheimer, author of The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology, another anti-tech book, the latest in a string of similar works. This one created a stir on the WWWEDU discussion list. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Its My Privacy, or Is It? (and What It Means for Our Students)
Vicki Davis describes a service called Imtellus that sells detailed personal information, everything from phone and social security numbers to maps, criminal record checks, credit reports and more. "It relates in every sort of way. Stalking just got a whole lot easier as did predatory behavior. It means that our children's and our own names have become even more important!" What I think is important to remember is that this information has always been available, it has just become cheaper to access. Your children aren't suddenly in more danger and you are not suddenly at greatly increased risk of identity theft. And I don't think we can create secrets out of things like our names, our addresses and our phone numbers (much less things like criminal records). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. VeriSign's OpenID SeatBelt Plugin
This is a good idea. One danger with OpenID - as with any login system - is that some site might try to fool you into thinking you're signing in, when in fact you're sending your userid and password to thieves. They do this by 'phishing' with phoney email warnings, and online, by redirecting you to fake versions of your OpenID sites. This product, by verisign, helps protect you. It keeps track of whether or not you are logged in - if you are logged in, any request for your password is a phoney. If you are not logged in, it prompts you to log in, so you aren't accidentally tripped up by a spoof site. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OpenID: Great Idea, Bewildering Consumer Experience
"It's way, way too hard to get started. All the sites supporting OpenID point curious users to the home page for the OpenID Foundation. From this site, it's actually stunningly difficult to find a link to a place where you can actually get an OpenID." Quite right. And don't even ask about the developer documentation. Things will get better, though. It's a very simple concept, at heart - one of these days I'll write an article giving my view on things, and maybe that will help. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. CIA, FBI Computers Used for Wikipedia Edits
This has caused a bit of a stir. "People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program." You'll probably find (ahem) some Government of Canada computers there too. Of course there are the critics. Sceptics like Gary Stager ask, "How will you explain this to your computer literacy students?" Simple? You tell them that governments, and especially unethical governments, have always manipulated the media, embedding their view of the world in everything from books to newspaper to films and television. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. XML-Based Office Document Standards
There has been a huge blow-up in the standards world recently (you should see the pile of documents I got through my Standards Council of Canada account) on the subject of open (XML) document standards. Microsoft used to basically own this field, as its proprietary (binary) Office format was the de facto standard. But industry pressure is forcing even Microsoft to open up. But the standards wars continue as Microsoft squares off against its rivals on exactly which sort of XML to use. The authors of this JISC report on open document standards write "There is an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats." I don't agree. What the use of an open standard allows is for people to use whatever documetn authoring software suits them the best - the idea is that you don't have to have a "co-ordinated, strategically informed action". This is the big economic advantage of open standards - decisions that used to carry considerable financial risk (VHS or beta, say, or HT or Blu-ray) now carry much less of a risk. More...