Signal to Noise

When I said Alec was bloviating, i didn’t mean it agregiously. Since I’m a frequent bloviator (I went to bloviation school and recently earned my license!), I will now incoherently bloviate like the best of ‘em on a topic that is near and dear.

Alec’s points about identity management, being very much in line with 2.0 thinking, are something which I may have haphazardly extrapolated into the realm of central identity authentication. Hey, the holidays are an up and down time, and between the strep throat and the beer, I’ve been awash in such irrational exuberance (exuberance because I managed to nab a Wii for the kids at literally the last minute; irrational because I didn’t pay retail, admittedly) that my judgement may temporarily have lapsed. Aside from fifth-degree bloviation, I also specialize in long sentences and parenthetical anecdotes.

Now, central trust management is something we need. The most common token used to identify otherwise-anonymous parties on the Internet is the domain. It’s been around since I was accessing Detroit Area Freenet on a SLIP account from my 2400-baud equipped Amiga in my mom’s upstairs bedroom. In Internet time, that’s an eternity. In realtime, that’s about sixteen years. Ah the days of zero-day uploads and setting my alarm for 4 AM to ‘download the second disk’.  I will mercifully digress now.

I guess my point is that DNS hasn’t matured in any remarkable way when it comes to authenticating the wielder of a domain.  I used to think I was cool when I would SMTP into my mail server and send my new hires messages from billgates@microsoft.com to see how wet behind the ears they really were. But guess what, I could still do it. And that’s still a problem.

No, it’s not a problem that necessarily affects Alec’s burgeoning models for identity management. It’s just a somewhat unrelated hole in the way the whole Internet works. Unfortunately, it applies to SIP as it applies to SMTP (and to HTTP; you should see all the fraudulent crap I have in my access log for this site).

Interestingly, despite my gaff, the original definition of ‘bloviate’, which I found to be much more complimentary than the one Alec found, came from the little-known Canadian Heritage Dictionary.