Exactly, the point of eating our own dog food is so we know what needs fixing and helps us build something better.
What we really need to move to going forward is a personal identifier that is:
* Free or very, very low cost (cents, no recurring fees)
* Unambiguously under the control of the user.
DNS names could have been that before ICANN was established and set itself up so it costs 140 million a year to run. But that is water under the bridge.
Fortunately, all a DNS name provides is a user-friendly handle identifying a user's persona. The design of ATprotocol is instructive here: the handle is merely an aide memoire to the real user identifier which is the hash of a public key used to authenticate updates.
In coarse terms, what if:
* Users can have as many personas as they choose
* Personas can be signed
* Personas can specify a means of validating updates by means of their signature.
* Personas can be exchanged directly by means of a QR code.
I will be bringing a proposal based on these tropes to Madrid:
* Personas are encoded as JSContact documents
* Personas MAY contain addresses for application protocols with associated OpenPGP, SSH, S/MIME, etc. etc. keys
* A new URI form which provides for encryption, authentication and location of the contact blobs is used to create secure references.
I am also working on a little Web tool that will allow people to set up contact packages easily.
