Vote for Kerry - not just against Bush

Posted Mon, 2004-10-04 22:18

I'm aloft somewhere between Rome and Cincinnati, jetting back towards my crazed, stupefied, dangerous country after three days in Berlin. I dread coming home. You know things have taken a paradoxical turn when Germany feels safe, sane, and free by comparison with the United States of America. But that's how it looks to me.

That's how it looks to the Germans too. The idea that we might actually re-elect George Bush is unfathomable - indeed, inexcusable - to them. As one of them put it to me, "We can forgive you for electing him once.

Baghdad Year Zero

Posted Sun, 2004-10-03 11:43

This is a great article. This stuff just doesn't appear in mainstream media. It's an analysis of what's been happening economically and politically in Iraq since the war started. Long, but IMO, well worth the read.

http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html

Peace,
Fen

John Beatty Followup

Posted Wed, 2004-07-28 01:49

Finally following up to a blog entry by John Beatty regarding a conversation he and I had back in June at Planetwork.

FOAF meets XRI

Posted Fri, 2004-07-23 09:28

FOAF uses the mbox field as a primary key. Here's a super-simple FOAF record:

Virtual Rights

Posted Wed, 2004-04-21 08:59

Jaco Aizenman just wrote me via the Anonymity group of orkut asking for

any comments you may have on Virtual Rights and Virtual Identity.

Details on:
http://www.nephridium.org/virtualrights/

Virtual Rights:

  1. To have a Virtual Identity
  2. Not to have a Virtual Identity

Letting Go

Posted Fri, 2004-04-02 05:25

I've been running my web servers off of a machine in my home office for eleven years (since August 1993).

Lessig on IP

Posted Fri, 2004-03-19 09:30

I have fought software patents for years, and am equally appalled at the creeping (creepy?) unlimited enforcement of copyright. Staford law professor Lawrence Lessig recently had this to say:

Tuesday sharpened the definition of the ongoing legal struggle to satisfy both proprietary and open source advocates through equitable intellectual property regulations.

Identity Commons

Posted Thu, 2004-03-18 12:24

We're trying out new ways of saying what we do. Here's one I sent a friend this evening...

The gist of what we're up to involves returning control over people's identities to the rightful owners - the people themselves. Today, many corporations each own bits and pieces of one's identity, and buy, sell and trade this information for their profit. A huge additional expense is incurred by each of these corps in trying to keep the data accurate and up-to-date, such as when people move, etc.

FOAF and XDI

Posted Thu, 2004-03-18 12:23

At the Identity Commons we're building a persistent global and/or local identity infrastructure using the OASIS standard for Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRI).

SharedId

Posted Sat, 2004-03-13 04:33

As I continue to work with Identity Commons, a colleague just pointed me to SharedId which is

... an authentication service that allows web users to share their personal information in a controlled manner with their favorite websites. SharedID is built on the open standards RSS, RDF and FOAF. [sharedid.com]

While this sounds promising, unfortunately SharedId is exactly the wrong thing.

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