Shibboleth Developers

["Cantor, Scott E." <>]

> We were actually talking about "persistent identifiers."

Take a look at the SAML spec to see what that means in context. It doesn't 
mean what you're talking about.

I do agree with you that the name sucks. I can send you Tony Nadalin's email 
address if you'd like to complain to the person responsible for the term not 
being "federated".

> People didn't accept URI's because they are not "human readible." I simply
> can't remember my OpenID URI identifier.People's brains only process about
> 7 characters. Again, your comment only pertains to i-names, not i-numbers.

It isn't just about readability, but about "technical wonkiness".

> Email addresses are re-assignable.

Yes, but when they're used to reference people for transitory purposes, that 
property doesn't usually matter.

> Persistent identfiers are needed.

Yes, they are. But correlatable identifiers harm privacy. Conflating internal 
identification with human-layer referencing is, I think, a mistake.

> That's where this conversation started. URI's are also re-assignable.

URIs are no more or less reassignable than anything else. That's a policy 
issue.

> Also, what's the email address for your university? Email addresses only
> address identifiers for people.

Which is why I only responded to that point. However my university can easily 
assign itself a URI that is persistent and identifies itself. We don't need 
XRI for that.

> But to digress for a minute, email is not really a good system for
> discovery. Extending SMTP for naming is not a good idea.

I'm not saying it is. I'm saying I can't change the fact that it is being 
used for that for the reasons we both recognize.

> Also, as you
> point out, Google-Yahoo-MSFT want everyone to use email because it adds
> value their media brand. Large websites want to verify email addresses
> with the issuer. So unless you want your global identifier controlled by
> one of the above, I would think you'd like an Internet scale alternative.

I do. I can't make that happen, but I do believe that URIs and DNS are that 
alternative, if one exists at all.

-- Scott