Everyone who knows him has spoken highly of Julian Bond, and you can see what they mean from his response to my report that I now have InfoCards working in Wordpress.
He begins by quoting my last posting:
I have good news. I’ve now been able to put together some mods for Wordpress that allow my site to accept infocards.
The mods were written in PHP, and Johannes Ernst - who I’ve been speaking with at the Berkman Identity Workshop - has asked me to publish the code on my blog. So I will. And I’ll explain how it works.
I realize InfoCards aren’t exactly ubiquitous right now, so you won’t be able to try it out immediately. But this weekend I’ll be posting a link to a video of the user experience.
Then the kicker:
This is tremendous news. Let me be the first to congratulate Kim. And I promise to put Mr Cynical back in the box.
This really makes me feel good. Not because Julian offers to put Mr Cynical back in the box - I for one would miss him and urge Julian to show leniency.
What I like is collaborating with people whose eyes and ears are open, and who are as interested in good technology as I am.
Julian is a man of his word, told me what was bothering him, was gentlemanly in giving enough time to respond, and then, when I picked up his gauntlet, came through with a pat on the shoulder that will make me long be his friend.
[...] Kim Cameron, what are you doing (he just announced that he got Microsoft’s InfoCards working on WordPress and PHP and is having a conversation with lots of people in the community)? You trying to ruin Microsoft’s reputation? By listening to folks like Marc Canter? “I came away incredibly excited and anxious to meet those folks at Mix06.” [...]
Kim responds
[...] Shelly Powers: “Kim Cameron has InfoCards working with Wordpress and PHP. This was in response to a challenge made to him some time back about implementing InfoCards in a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment. I’m not necessarily sanguine of the concept of InfoCards, but the effort that Kim has done deserves recognition and a well done.” [...]
Kim responds Thanks Shelly. I still hope that when we demonstrate how simple InfoCards are in practice, despite the tortured theory, I’ll win you over.
[...] Yesterday I proposed the idea of creating a trust-system that would allow people to build and display credentials. Then Scoble posted on Kim Cameron’s implementation of Infocards in WordPress. Infocards store and authenticate digital identities, from Kim’s detailed description of the InfoCard system: Digital identities consist of sets of claims made about the subject of the identity, where “claims” are pieces of information about the subject that the issuer asserts are valid. This parallels identities used in the real world. For example, the claims on a driver’s license might include the issuing state, the driver’s license number, name, address, sex, birth date, organ donor status, signature, and photograph, the types of vehicles the subject is eligible to drive, and restrictions on driving rights. The issuing state asserts that these claims are valid. The claims on a credit card might include the issuer’s identity, the subject’s name, the account number, the expiration date, the validation code, and a signature. The card issuer asserts that these claims are valid. The claims on a self-issued identity, where the identity provider and subject are one and the same entity, might include the subject’s name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address, or perhaps just the knowledge of a secret. For self-issued identities, the subject asserts that these claims are valid. [...]
Kim responds Cool. Only thing to be careful of is a subtlety that I too sometimes fail to convey in my summaries. InfoCards themselves contain the metadata about the relationship and where to go to get the set of claims representing the digital identity, etc. They don’t contain all the personal data - it remains in the “identity provider” and then is passed through the client to the relying party. This is important because I could have an InfoCard that represents my credit card number and yet never stores it on the client.
I’ll spend more time with your summary and see if I can use it as a starting point for the one-page infocard summary requested by Adam. Thanks.
refreshing. I’d love to see the codebase. The last time i posted a commnent here suggesting the use of openid or LID to moderate spam, My post was deleted… well, I guess Youre the boss here. It’s your blog and you have the right to choose whose comments stay and which ones go..
Anyway. I’m impressed with the efforts put into enabling infocards working with wordpress. The more impressive part is that it’s PHP MODS. and if you could post the codebase or provide some means whereby we can take a glance at it, it probably would do more good as “we” would positively try to adapt it to be used as plugins into a whole lot of LAMP sites that exists today
Cheers.
looking forward to that codebase….
http://mylid.net/Rohan.Pinto
Kim replies: Sorry if I deleted anything Rohan - certainly not intentional!! I’ve been fighting spam and have accidently erase some messages.