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July 09, 2002
Digital ID World Conference
I've been invited to speak at the Digital ID World conference in Denver on October 9-11th.
Identity and identity management is something I've written about before on these pages. The ironic thing is that state governments issue what is now considered the gold standard of identity for most purposes: the driver's license. Yet, state's don't consider themselves to be in the identity business. We have abdicated that responsibility to private companies. This may be OK, but we should pay attention to what is really happening: we're changing a fundamental model for identity, even if that model has been ad hoc or implicit.
The other side of identity in government is that governments store large amounts of personally identifying information on citizens. Citizens are schizophrenic about this state of affairs: they demand the services, yet they fear the IT systems required to provide them.
Come what may, this is a public policy debate, not a technology debate. The most we can hope to do as technologists is to inform the debate as best we can and provide the best technology we can for what ever decision the public process comes up with.
09:40 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Guardian on Warchalking
This article in the Guardian quotes my weblog. Interesting all the press that warchalking has generated.
08:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Book Review
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition
by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman (Contributor), Julie Sussman (Contributor)
I was just reading Gordon Weakliem's weblog and noticed that he'd gotten interested in Scheme and was reading the Little Schemer. I've read the Little Schemer and its OK, but Sussman and Abelson's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" has to be the best. It was used for years at MIT as the introductory text for computing. I've used it to teach hundreds of students in introductory computer science and programming language courses and think its the finest computer science text ever written. The book has very sophisticated prinicipals in it, including a heavy dose of abstraction, and I think it gives an excellent grounding in principles as well as teaching beginning students to write some pretty cool programs.