Internet should have a person object like user://ryanpeyton3301 | Hacker News Reader

Internet should have a person object like user://ryanpeyton3301

3 pointsvtempest11 comments

instead of emails and passworded authentications, everyone has a user identity just like a social security number that can be used on any of the plethora of online chat communities, payments for things (bitcoin paypal cc), or personal blog posts.<p>maybe the same for business:// or place:// since the internet is like this hive mind that should have all our useful data categorized well. but URLS are awful at logical categorization since there is no predictable standard patterns -- thats why google's the defacto gateway to the internet

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This is an awful idea. It's an Internet version of a Social Security Number (which itself is heavily criticized).

First, anonymity is a useful tool on the Internet, even for non-criminals. It helps protect you against criminals, governments, corporations, and other entities who may want to globally identify and track you.

Second, all a bad guy needs is a single credential and he's got access to everything of yours, from your banking, to your spanking (porn memberships), to dating sites, to family pictures, email, etc. I don't know about you, but I have separate credentials for everything and beyond that, I like to maintain separate personas between my work and personal life, and heck, even facets of my personal life.

There are opt-in sort of things for this that largely meet your desires, such as Open ID or your Facebook login. What about those don't work for you?

When did this become against crime? YOU COULD HAVE A FAKE INTERNET ID. Why are you shocked? Someone could break into your house while you are at work and use your home computer that's turned on to log in and post as you. This internet identity is not something that you are criminally responsible for, proof beyond reasonable doubt. This is more like eliminating the need for emails and forum registrations. Yes, Google does this to some point. But it should not be a private company. It should be part of the internet. I sign in to the internet itself, and have to register with the internet provider. These things can be faked, of course, just like credit cards are fakeable. But the point is the internet would be more like World of Wacraft, you have your central identity that interacts with all parts of that world.

I agree. Doing so would definitely make it much easier for the FBI to track criminals, right? And sociopaths - no longer would a low level detective require a search warrant to take an arrestee's computer to create a lineage of every action they've performed; now the detective could do so from his own laptop just by typing in the user id. And civil attorneys who used to have to have a warrant to get a doctor's computer records would now no longer need such a thing to show that the doctor's Google search terms clearly show a poor education/malpractice. This would certainly lead to a safer internet and probably eliminate crime on the web all together.

That's what you mean, right?

That initial field you're stepping on is protocol; it doesn't make any sense to overload it with entity type. You could define an entirely different standard where entity-type is first, but in that case don't mimic the look of URLs as it will only lead to confusion.

Regarding giving each individual a unique URL, that's the idea behind OpenId.

This idea is to change the internal plumbing of the internet. make it so a userId is not just something you get via email or some site. but its a key internal part of the browser that you can access like user.getName() similar to location.href

I don't want every jackass with JavaScript able to obtain my identity from my browser.

Or more politely, this doesn't solve a problem I have.

you would of course authorize what you share. it would solve a huge problem of the fact that the internet is the only identity-less technology we have - everything else from nations, tv & news, schools, et al have identities. the internet is like this hive mind. we need a permanent id as secure as a social security card

I already have an internet identity. If I need another, I am capable of creating it myself.

DNS + IPV6?

Unfortunately its hard to get anything approved in this slow-moving world.

Internet has evolved to such a point where we should throw out the old plumbing we built it all on, and make what has proven to be the common use cases. "place food subway" and "person mary jones text" seem like more logical ways to map the human brain onto the internet hive mind. the internet should have a built-in drop down menu search for all the things you might select from any type of data categorized as humans would

Right, I think pretty much everyone will agree that the current system is broken and there are many things that could be done better, but... since we do know that IPv6 is a thing, and your solution would require the world-wide adoption that IPv6 is trying to get at, they would needlessly compete?

Unless I misunderstood your model

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