
Coding Horror: A Visit With Alan Kay - Anon84
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001213.html
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sdfx
_Since I knew I'd be seeing Alan Kay at Rebooting Computing, I decided to
verify his Stack Overflow usage in person. [...]

We then proceeded to discuss how it's sad that identity is still hard online._

Couldn't this be solved, at least for the tech-savvy crowd, by beeing able to
sign an openID-account with a PGP-Signature? This way you could "prove" that
your openID belongs to you, the same way you can prove the authenticity of an
email right now.

The problem with this is that openID is no fun right now and the last thing
that is needed is more complexity. But at least Jeff would be able to know
whether or not Alan Kay really posted on his page.

~~~
fcjqbuvjxpxml
Hence solving the problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing
an openid) with a real person by the much simpler problem of associating a
random set of symbols (representing a public key) with a real person.

~~~
biohacker42
Ah yes, but you've tremendously reduced the problem.

With PGP you can _verify_ all online posting, so you reduce the problem to a
singular instance: public key vs real person.

That is a huge improvement.

------
mlLK
_The Mother of All Demos:_ Doug Englebart showing off an NLS at
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097> of which Alan
was so fondly referencing in his lecture.

