The tabs! They multiply like magnificently miscellaneous maggots!
Literature · Good Time Crime: Talking With Elmore Leonard in Contrappasso Magazine.
For those like Scalzi in general or the Old Man’s War series in particular, check out The Sagan Diary over at Subterranean Press.
And now for something completely different: Jeremy Wilson, perhaps the leading biographer of T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”), observes that there have been many moving-picture takes on his life, and offers T. E. Lawrence – alternative drama treatments, which I enjoyed tremendously but then I’m a Lawrence nut.
Identity · That’s right, stuff related to my day job. Nat Sakimura: What to read when you want to build OpenID Connect and Write an OpenID Connect server in three simple steps. From Frank Stajano, The quest to replace passwords, an intro and graphic from a big paper presented at the IEEE.
Here’s a brief, understated, but very solid consideration of what it might mean to be a Privacy Preserving IDP.
A clever idea about auditing your identity: I long for the future where I can safely assume my passwords are stolen.
Susan Landau and Tyler Moore offer us Economic Tussles in Federated Identity Management which is still in my to-read queue. It’s long and in small print, but I respect Susan so I will.
QR codes as a universal authentication mechanism? See SQRL. Uh huh.
Authentication · Yeah, it’s enough of a distinct subset that it gets its own headline. Here are a cluster that talk about the notion of what I’ve been calling “session strength”; being authenticated is not necessarily a binary thing, as in how sure are you that that person is really running the browser? How FIDO Works, OpenID Provider Authentication Policy Extension 1.0, NIST Standard (which I’ll fill in the title of when the US government revives itself), An IANA Registry for Level of Assurance (LoA) Profiles, ISO/IEC 29115: – Entity authentication assurance framework.
Activism and the Net · Don’t know much about OpenMedia (“Home of the pro-Internet community”), but anyone who’s against the TPP is probably OK by me.
The Internet Society is trying to do some basic education; the three tutorials at Manage Your Identity are a little too cool and over-formal for me, but I think they’re solid.
I don’t know if I’ve linked to this already, but 451 Unavailable is running with an idea I helped cook up, which makes me happy, except it makes me unhappy that anyone has to.
Life Online · The abstract of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking begins “Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide?” which I think is a pretty germane question.
Software · Simon St. Laurent’s From BASIC to HyperTalk to JavaScript to Rails to Erlang is similar in flavor if not in the details to my own journey through the language landscape.
It’s obvious that we’re in a Cambrian Explosion of browser-centric Web technologies. Angular and Ember and Backbone are so 2012 and they all start to blur together in my mind, but I don’t know what the new hotness is. Hey, here’s something pretty different: arc.io.
I don’t know if retina.js is what I need, but retina-quality graphics is something I really need to buckle down and work on for this space.
Parting shots · Did you know that A Daughter of the Gods, the first commercial film that cost a million bucks to make, was also the first one with a nude scene, and that it featured the wonderful-looking Annette Kellerman, and that it’s lost to history? Neither did I.
Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real by Richard Brody in The New Yorker. So expand your mind already.
