28 Mar 2001 pelleb   » (Apprentice)

Ra-a-as. Just discovered I have 2 diary entries that are quite similar. I must be tired. Didn't even realise I had alread written some of that stuff down.

Whats happened since last is that Microsoft has released Hailstorm, which is quite interesting in a join the dark side Luke kind of way.

For those who arent familiar with Hailstorm check out Dave Winers discussion of it.

While I dont like the centralised approach to Hailstorm, there is plenty of scope for doing subversive tunneling here. Hailstorm, is based on mainly open protocols. All of Microsofts apps are going to be supporting them. There is already lots of OpenSource software supporting the protocols. My favorite is Soap::Lite for Perl. We can have lots of fun here and open up lots of alternate services to compete with MicroSofts. How about forexample if the SlashDot, SourceForge etc had Soap interfaces, they already have RSS interfaces. SOAP is just the next step.

Ofcourse, for Microsoft it's all about keeping the important data on their servers letting them do all sorts of nasty aggregations on it. Even if Microsoft is as they say they are concerned about privacy it's always a great thing for someone like the NSA or the MI5 here in England to have a single point of contact. Hey they might even have their own SOAP interface into Passport, where they can play to their hearts content.

So why not come up with a similar scheme, except let the software behind it be OpenSource and use some sort of distributed way of sharing the data. You could even have a tiny HushMail style login applet, that fetches your encrypted data from a distributed filestore and decrypts it in the applet after you entering your username and passphrase. This would send a Kerberos style ticket back to the server needing authentication.

This would still allow tracking on the local website level, but not on a global level.

Otherwise I'm working on some neat stuff in Python at the moment.

Booyaka-sha ... West side
-P

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