post 112

By anders pearson 27 Sep 2000

when i first took a look at this, i was (and to some degree i still am) extremely skeptical. after digging through the incomprehensible marketroid speech and finding a little more helpful a description, it appears to me to be yet another attempt at taming the polyglot of online identities with one standard replacemnt for email addresses, multiple username/passwords for different sites, digital business cards, and e-cash. a good idea if one can actually get the system designed right and get it off the ground. so many have tried and so many have failed because of the old chicken and egg syndrome. so my first reaction to this XNS thing is to start up a pool on how long it takes before this one tanks too.

but i read a little more, talk to a few people and, while i still think that the chicken/egg problem will probably do this one in too, i do see a small glimmer of hope. first of all, they appear to be approaching it from the right direction, designing a flexable architecture and, most importantly, making it an open architecture. it’s also apparently a non-profit venture. they hope that by publishing the underlying protocols of the system, working within existing standards as much as possible and releasing a bunch of code under an open-source license, they can get enough support from open-source types and get it built into enough systems that they can reach that critical mass of having enough people using it that it is actually useful. should be interesting to see if they can pull it off. if they can, and it becomes widespread, i’m thinking that it could be a good framework for getting a nice public-key infrastructure up and running.

i wish them the best of luck, but i’m not holding my breath.