[msy]

That particular holy grail is a poisoned chalice and it's claimed plenty of victims, anyone remember Sxip? It's not a technical problem, it's power, control and ownership. Anyone in a position to allow a platform to get serious traction isn't going to give that control up and anyone that isn't can't make a system with enough traction. Then there's issues of trust, delegation and longevity. I'd love someone to do it well, I'd love the ability to have anonymous, durable, cryptographically verifiable identities online that could be optionally tied to meatspace identifiers but I just don't see it happening.

[wmf]

Anyone in a position to allow a platform to get serious traction isn't going to give that control up and anyone that isn't can't make a system with enough traction.

InfoCard is surprisingly non-evil, and I also think Firefox is ideally placed to work on this (oh look, here's the solution: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/identity-in-the-browser-fire... ), but they don't seem to care enough.

[nika]

The department of commerce wants to create such an identity system. I'm not sure I like the idea, but it would be "single sign on". I think it is a safe bet that their intention is to eventually make it mandatory, and they have the "ownership", presumed trust, and longevity, not to mention the ability to pass laws "encouraging" adoption.

There are probably better news reports out there, but this is what I found with a quick google: http://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2011/01/07/us-co...

[jerf]

Putting it in the hands of the government actually fails the trust requirement. Trust is not a binary "this entity is trustworthy", trust is a set of relationships between two entities, and not everyone will trust the US Government, nor will everybody be trusted by the US Government. Even in a perfect world with a perfect US Government, that is the correct answer; not everyone is under US jurisdiction, after all, so we don't even need to get into the political issues. If made mandatory (and the only option), this is a critical failure on the trust front. It can't work, you can't tie your login system to only the US login system, and if you have to have other login systems, US citizens will be able to use those too.

[dholowiski]

Yet another (scary) example of the U.S. trying to act more like China (with regards to the internet): http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2010/oct/22/chinas-real-n...

The previous example being the DHS censoring web sites such as The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks.

[jarek]

That might make it a viable single-identity system. As long as you only want U.S. users.

[wmf]

If NSTIC works, it's likely that other countries will adopt it.

[jarek]

I can already see the early adopters: Russia, China, France, Germany...

Even if you do it so that the actual data stores are separate and you manage to keep the APIs the same, lots of countries will have huge issues with adopting U.S. policies.

[rsingel]

No, the Department of Commerce wants to help create a standard. It's a damn hard task, but even harder when the net's FUD is the feds want to create an identity system. No, no they don't. And their process is pretty great. But they will fail, in no small part due to FUD, and we'll all be using Facebook Login Plus soon and wondering why we never got an open standard.

[noss]

I wonder how much different their project is to the bank-id and e-legitimation used in Sweden.