Presence and IntComm WG

[Neal McBurnett <>]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 02:19:45PM -0600, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Correct. So one question is: can the user discover that the remote 
> domain is PIC-assured?

I think supporting access to this info is an important element of
taking advantage of better identity assurance.  Are there good ways to
do that now in XMPP?

Also, I assume your model #2 - that every id is assured at a given
domain.  The bigger question is whether any sort of attributes can can
be made part of that (e.g. "faculty" vs "student").

> >But the client interface needs to indicate it to the user
> >in some fashion.
> 
> And we have to wonder if the user cares. :)

This is related in some ways to cloaks on irc at
e.g. irc.freenode.net.  People covet cloaks that identify the user as
an "Ubuntu Member" or identify a bot as approved in some way:

 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IrcTeam/Cloaks

and others see a user's cloak when they join a room.  Without any sort
of cloak you have less privacy since your IP address is shown.

And as others have said, it is perhaps more likely that the
infrastructure or the user's client would make identity assurances
useful - e.g. blanket access to chat room roles, etc.  Again, e.g. in
IRC many chat rooms are configured so that folks with certain sorts of
cloaks can take on special roles (changing topics etc).

> >One somewhat compelling use case that was discussed recently is
> >the use of a federated authorization system to construct members-
> >only (eg. PIC/Internet2 members-only) chat rooms.
> 
> Sure. But that could be done in a different way, via SAML-aware 
> groupchat services for example.

A more general mechanism would seem useful, so that user agents could
also use this sort of info.

Cheers,

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/