In other news, Moon says he’s the Messiah, but I don’t think it was an April Fool’s prank.

Updates

1. A way to test Moon’s assertion proposed in Atrios’ comments: “So, let’s crucify him next Friday and see if he rises again.”
2. Trackbacks aren’t comments. I’m the only one who gets to talk about the Black Heliocopters. :)
3. Dan Lyke looked into the Moon thing further. It looks like puffery on the part of Moon, rather than a wholesale endorsement by members of Congress. Still, I don’t want the guy running Sex Education programs. Wasn’t Betty Bowers available?
4. Scary Messianic Moon photo at Gorenfeld’s blog, along with another Highly Effective Guy. Kinda makes you want to burn your Franklin Planner, don’t it?

In the Old Testament, somewhere in Judges, there’s a story of how, after a battle, the Gileadite warriors needed to distinguish their own side and their enemies, the Ephraimites. They did not all know each other, but they asked anyone who tried to cross a river to pronounce the word “shibboleth”. Those who pronounced it wrong (as “Sibboleth”) were, as usually happens in Old Testament stories, killed.

Internet2 is sponsoring the Shibboleth project, http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/, which has a lot of interest from libraries as a way of handling the problem of identifying who’s a member of a group in a decentralized fashion. It’s designed to let me go to another university and assert that certain things are true, such as: (1) I am Rick Keir, and (2) I am a staff member at UW. The other school can validate these assertions because UW cooperates with the request, but the other school can’t arbitrarily ask “is Bill Humphries a staff member at UW”, because you didn’t request any service from them. Most of my personal information stays safely within UW; only the assertions I make about myself leave.

I could see a future in which Shibboleth servers were more widespread, and people would join Shib-circles just as they can be friends in the LiveJournal sense. Then I could go to, say, [someone's] journal, assert that “I am a Friend-of-Bill” and be let in, because [she] has decided to share part or all of her journal with the Friends of Bill.

Shibboleth is Open Sourced, so the Weblog community could start working with it.

Drupal offers more control over users and user permissions than Movable Type. It might do what’s needed for walled garden posting.

Drupal’s a nice system, but it doesn’t do what I really want: I’d like a system which does not require the user to set up an account. I’d like to get a token in the request that says “I’m Jane User, and here’s my assertation that I’m Jane User”, and since Jane User is my friend and her assertation could be verified (though a public directory, or because someone I trust has signed her key), she gains access to the friends and family-only materials on the server without signing in. And, the key piece is that this may be the first time she’s been on the site.

Live Journal can do that because all the journals are part of the application, and I sign on once. Any LJ user can recognize me as their friend, and I get access to their friends-only materials.

The godsawful piece is the public key infrastructure.

From the Cypherpunks Nettime list, yet another essay on the WTC/Pentagon attacks, where the author points out that the APIs and interface abstractions which make life easy also make it dangerous:

As of Tuesday

fly-by-wire is to “terrorists” what Perl is to script-kiddies. Inevitably as technologies enable humans to move more metal and petroleum tubes faster, further and higher with less brain work, less training and less expertise than the day before… well, more potential energy, less brains equals higher risk.

If Senator Fritz has his way, no new technologies will be brought to market without a one-year review. Open Source will be dead, since there will be no way to ensure that your users don’t remove your mandated copy-protection measures.

I’d call Hollings a whore, but that would be unfair to prostitutes.

However, the cypherpunk community isn’t keen on letting The Allmighty sign their keys just yet.

The browser asks if you want to trust the Aleph-One length key signed by the Tree of Life Cert Authority.

I’d venture a State where anonymous conversation is banned can be just as bad as one where Islamic Fascists lurk under every rock. There may not be singular, violent catastrophes like the WTC attack, but there will opportunity for many catastrophes below the threshold of observablity.

The truer and sadder story of crypto was that the spooks and the geeks both beat the hell out of our democratic process, rendering lawyers, consumers, the Congress, the industry, and the Administration totally irrelevant, and leaving crypto as a blasted technical wasteland, in a kind of Afghan-style feud, where every single party was necessarily a crook, or a scofflaw, or a deceiver, or weirdly suspect, and there was no legitimacy, and no common ground, and still, today, no good method to assemble any.

And if you’re having second thoughts about encryption, consider this: the bad guys are attacking computers. If you keep sensitive material for your work or family on a machine, then encryption helps protect you.