My take on slicing and dicing is that it can be controlled by allowing Alice to move the data elsewhere and forbid the sharing of data by the RS beyond that. To the extent Alice has the ability to move the data to where there are better slicing and dicing tools, then the RS has some incentive to support the tools itself.

It's a pretty binary thing, either Alice can move all the data and shut off other sharing or not. Is this an example of a User Submitted Term? If so, we should give it a name because it's special compared to other terms.

Adrian

On Monday, November 7, 2016, John Wunderlich <john@wunderlich.ca> wrote:
Jeff;

re: "The problem we are trying to solve is similar to the labor issues that arose in the wake of the industrial revolution.  Working conditions were dictated by the "bosses."  You had a "take it or leave it" choice.  But there were lots of people who were upset.  In response, the labor union movement evolved.  This gave labor enough power to be recognized -- enough power to be able to get a seat at the negotiating table.  And conditions improved.  But even labor unions could only gain "one-size-fits-all" improvements.  And some laborers are frustrated by the dues they pay to their unions because they don't feel that they are getting the particular working conditions they desire.

Technology may gradually give us low-cost ways to allow enterprises (commercial and governmental) to address the myriad permutations we desire.  But we aren't there yet."

The network effect that tends to a leading provider in any given category is similar to the consolidation and reduction of competition that happens in markets. It's also apt that the workers were not customers, but a source of value, where the cost of acquisition and maintenance 'needs' to be minimised. This begs the question, however, of what would be the equivalent organisation to a union organising drive to push back against imposed conditions? It seems that User Submitted Terms might be a potential for that role.

On the question of myriad permutations, that seems to be a red herring, as it is the case that customer or employee data is already sliced and diced in many ways, contingent to attributes assigned to the data. The issue isn't the slicing and dicing, but rather who has the power/authority to determine what attributes will be used for filtering and processing. This flows back to the question of governance. You articulated a tripartite model of governance based on ownership, but it makes more sense to me to use "authority" rather than "ownership" for governance. The key question is "Who, or what role, has the authority to make a decision (or write to the blockchain)".

If we use 'authority', Bob can maintain ownership of records, but can enter into negotiations with Alice about what to delegate/assign authority for Alice to assert control over data relating to her. This may create a fourth category for governance - pairwise authority. But I note that this articulation is not a meaningful one in the absence of either a market or regulatory answer to the network affect that reduces Alice's choice of provider.

This is the background and context for the contribution that I'm writing for the report on User Submitted Terms and Consent Receipts.

JW.




Sincerely,
John Wunderlich
@PrivacyCDN

Call: +1 (647) 669-4749
eMail: john@wunderlich.ca

On 4 November 2016 at 15:44, j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com> wrote:
A slightly different perspective on John's two points:

1. An individual should be free to assert control over their own information assets. This may be accomplished by them running their own systems or by delegating that control to a third party to operate on their behalf; which implies that,
2. An individual should be free to negotiate the terms of their relationships with information service providers. 

I appreciate the goal of giving individual consumer better negotiating power.  And I am pleased to support technical solutions that can support that end.  But I don't see that we are dealing with the entire problem.  Rather, we are focused on one aspect of it:  the lack of an interface that affords us the granularity to define our own terms, rather than merely accept contracts of adhesion.

But this is a systems problem.  And solving one leg of the stool is insufficient on its own to support the stool.  We create various solutions for this - federation, UMA, etc. - but the Relying Paties (RPs) who we want to accept our custom terms don't show up. And we act surprised.  Why aren't they flocking to us.   It isn't that they have zero regard for their customers.  It is because we have failed to solve the other elements of the systems problem.  To the RPs, negotiating with each customer individually would create an operational (and legal) nightmare for them.  Just because we can immutably capture the custom terms in a blockchain as a reference doesn't mean that the RPs can deliver what we request.  Many can't afford to negotiate separately with each of their millions of customers -- much less to deliver millions of customized offerings.  They don't have the manpower.  It would cost so much that it would put them out of business.  

Many business have considered these costs.  And their reply to our attempts at negotiation is "take it or leave it" because there is no one else offering anything better to prompt them to change.  Eventually enough people coalesce around certain values to become a viable market.  This has happened with organic food.  Enough people are willing to pay the premium for produce that is "organic."  But others, just as desirous of the higher quality food, just can't afford the higher prices.  Have we considered the cost impacts of obtaining the customization of BobCo's services that we seem to be seeking?  

This doesn't mean that a tool such as UMA can't be viable today for a particular subset of interactions in which Alice sets unique terms for the use of her content.  In this case, Alice is the RP dictating terms of use of her proprietary information.  (Of course, if her information is her credit card transactions, it is not her "property."  It's "ownership" is shared with the shop she dealt and with her credit card issuer (at a minimum).)  But my ISP provides me and millions of my peers with a wide range of services.  They currently lack the infrastructure to customize these services beyond a fixed menu of choices.  Slowly, they are becoming more granular.  They offer me a choice of packages.  But the packages are fixed.  Printers now offer "custom" t-shirts with anything we want printed on them.  But the selection of t-shirts is still of their choosing.

The problem we are trying to solve is similar to the labor issues that arose in the wake of the industrial revolution.  Working conditions were dictated by the "bosses."  You had a "take it or leave it" choice.  But there were lots of people who were upset.  In response, the labor union movement evolved.  This gave labor enough power to be recognized -- enough power to be able to get a seat at the negotiating table.  And conditions improved.  But even labor unions could only gain "one-size-fits-all" improvements.  And some laborers are frustrated by the dues they pay to their unions because they don't feel that they are getting the particular working conditions they desire.

Technology may gradually give us low-cost ways to allow enterprises (commercial and governmental) to address the myriad permutations we desire.  But we aren't there yet.

Jeff




---------------------------------
Jeff Stollman
+1 202.683.8699


Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
                                    Max Planck

On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 2:50 PM, j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com> wrote:
James,

I am pleased with your point about centralization:  succinct and well stated!

Thank you.

Jeff


---------------------------------
Jeff Stollman
+1 202.683.8699


Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
                                    Max Planck

On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 12:15 PM, James Hazard <james.g.hazard@gmail.com> wrote:
My two cents on centralization:

A blockchain is "centralizing."  The innovation is that it disperses control of the center.  And even though the center is replicated.  It is more centralizing than a P2P model, where only the direct parties have a copy of their transactions.

The participants in a P2P system can rely on any form of validation that they deem adequate.  That might include conventional systems, such as that they know one another, and can cajole, shame or sue one another.  It might include having a "trust provider" - some one whose stake in their reputation is greater than their stake (even indirect) in the transaction.  That could be a mutual friend, a congregation (e.g. marriage vows), a trustee, a bank, bank regulator, land recording office, the WayBack machine, Github, or a blockchain.

There does not need to be a universal system that everyone trusts, and perhaps the system would be more robust if there is not a universal system.  A patchwork of trust relationships may be better. 

There are already some quasi-universal systems of second-hand trust - notably via governments and via banks.  The academic, scientific and business communities also have domain-specific quasi-universal systems. 

  



 


On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 7:35 AM, Eve Maler <eve.maler@forgerock.com> wrote:
Awesome thread. I am going to try to net out some assertions and potential conclusions in this thread that we could mark as observations For The Report / Needs More Discussion (preparatory to including in the report). I would like us all to be thinking in these terms from now on in this DG's lifespan. If you take issue with a For The Report suggestion, we can turn it into a Needs More Discussion agenda item. (I recommend we time-box each one.)

By the way, I can't make the next two weeks' worth of meetings (!), so please stay tuned regarding any impacts on meeting schedule. Thomas and I are coordinating.
  • Blockchain vs. DLT: Do we intend to distinguish "blockchain encryption" vs. the aggregation of distributed ledger technology that is typically associated with "blockchain"? To date we've done the latter (and this is what's in the report now, with extensive language), while Jeff is suggesting the former. Needs More "Discussion", but I suggest we should actually take a vote or similar and not spend time arguing.
  • Netting out Jim's comments about Alice and Bob transactions: Saving transaction records (or pointers to them) on this type of ledger are valuable when preserving reciprocality between/among parties in a transaction is desired, and this has salutary effects on evening out the empowerment situation among them. I suggest this is For The Report.
  • Jeff's point that "It supports Information Integrity by raising the bar for attackers seeking to compromise the data store by compelling them to modify a majority of copies of the data store to achieve consensus on the modified records." I suggest this is usable as is For The Report.
  • This technology generally is known to have security, privacy, and inefficiency (both at rest = bloat and in motion = mining) concerns generally, which is why we're seeing a design pattern in many cases emerge of storing information in other types of repositories and pointers/hashes on the ledger. Classic identity profile information, however, is written less frequently and read more frequently, as Adrian pointed out. Nonetheless, we still see this design pattern being used (e.g. in Sovrin). I suggest this is For The Report.
  • Jeff's point that "It distributes the governance role of "trusted authority" when members of the community are unwilling to trust any of their fellows to be the keeper of the system of record." Our ongoing conversation about governance models and permissionless/permissioned seems to complicate this a bit, so I suspect that it Needs More Discussion to add color. E.g., are controls being added back at technical layers? business layers? both?
  • (Co-chair's privilege: :-) ) For me, the million-dollar question is: When permissioning of any kind is added back, most often, it comes in a re-centralizing form. In what use cases does this harm the original point of the exercise? Needs More Discussion.

Eve Maler
ForgeRock Office of the CTO | VP Innovation & Emerging Technology
Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl
The ForgeRock Identity Summit is coming to Paris in November!


On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 7:15 AM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
Yes you do need overall standards in the system. That's exactly what Rebooting Web of Trust is doing by standardizing DID and DDO.

Adrian


On Friday, November 4, 2016, Susan <susan.joseph1786@gmail.com> wrote:
So the minute you agree hard forks can happen in a permissionless system, think DAO, what kind of mechanism exists to keep the actors in check? You need overall standards for the system. 

Susan

SheTechPower



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On Nov 4, 2016, at 10:00 AM, j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com> wrote:

Thorsten,

Regarding your comment:

Given the assumption, that a BSC/DLT System for Identities needs to be 'public', it leaves Permissioned or permissionless on the table. Permissionless needs a mechanism to make sure the 'bad guys' do not overrule the good guys, which (currently?) is done by mining mechanism (inefficient).

I would suggest that a Permissioned system also "needs a mechanism to make sure the 'bad guys' do not overrule the good guys."  Who is doing the permissioning?  Can we trust this party to be unbiased.  The reason for mining is to avoid handing over control to any single party who may be/become corrupt.  Permissioned systems make a lot of sense for private blockchains where the blockchain serves the goals of the party who grants permission, because this party has little incentive to corrupt its own system.  But in a public blockchain, what party is sufficiently above suspicion that everyone using the system can trust them?  Given the cultural diversity of the world, I don't know that there can be agreement on that.  In some countries, banks are trusted.  In others, governments.  But I don't think there is likely to be an entity that can be trusted across the board.

Jeff


---------------------------------
Jeff Stollman
+1 202.683.8699


Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
                                    Max Planck

On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 6:53 AM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
Identity, unlike payment, is a "read mostly" activity relative to a broadcast mechanism like Bitcoin. Therefore, inefficiency is hardly an issue. When it comes to identity, the principal difference between permissioned and permissionless seems to be how they handle attributes. What seems to be happening is a happy coexistence by defining identifiers in a way that allows many different methods to resolve an attribute linked to an identifier.

Adrian 

On Friday, November 4, 2016, Thorsten H. Niebuhr [WedaCon GmbH] <tniebuhr@wedacon.net> wrote:


I think you mean this one:


Given the assumption, that a BSC/DLT System for Identities needs to be 'public', it leaves Permissioned or permissionless on the table. Permissionless needs a mechanism to make sure the 'bad guys' do not overrule the good guys, which (currently?) is done by mining mechanism (inefficent).

Which would indicate that it should be a 'permissioned' one.




On 01.11.2016 22:05, Adrian Gropper wrote:
Jeff makes a very important point. At the Verifiable Claims F2F, Drummond Reed put up a nice 2x2 table (that I have no link to) that showed: Permissioned / Permissionless on one axis and Public / Private on the other. Sovrin is an example of a permissioned blockchain that is public (anyone can use it). Bitcoin and Ethereum are permissionless and public. Private blockchains are just "old fashioned" technology from this perspective. Valuable, and may benefit from standardization, but unlikely to disrupt as far as I can tell.

Adrian

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 4:28 PM, j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com> wrote:
I would make a slight correction to the applicability of DLT.

From my perspective, Distributed Ledger Technology has two broad areas of applicability.

  1. It supports Information Integrity by raising the bar for attackers seeking to compromise the data store by compelling them to modify a majority of copies of the data store to achieve consensus on the modified records.
  2. It distributes the governance role of "trusted authority" when members of the community are unwilling to trust any of their fellows to be the keeper of the system of record.
But I do not equate DLT with Blockchain Technology.  When DLT uses blockchain encryption in the datastore, I would consider it to be a Blockchain Technology application.  This may be the current case for most currently envisioned DLT applications.  

Alternatively, Blockchain Technology (i.e., blockchain encryption) may be applied to datastores that are not distributed.  I can envision private blockchains that are run by trusted parties that intentionally hold data close to avoid compromising private or confidential data.  The blockchain encryption may be applied to help ensure data integrity.

Jeff


---------------------------------
Jeff Stollman
+1 202.683.8699


Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out.
Science advances one funeral at a time.
                                    Max Planck
On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
I agree as well.

DLT is useful for:
- maintaining reputation (such as control of an identifier)
- timestamping, ordering of transactions, and related audit support
- avoiding replay or double-spend

Mostly, DLT makes identity federations much less important if not actually irrelevant.

Adrian

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 2:33 PM, James Hazard <james.g.hazard@gmail.com> wrote:
Agree with Eve that DLT seems usually to be the wrong platform when there are participants who can be contacted.  

My impression is that DLT/blockchain is useful, perhaps necessary, when there is the possibility that nodes will have to act but will have no contact with a trust provider.  E.g., the thermostat must be able to be authenticated vis-à-vis the furnace, and must be able to demonstrate ability to pay, even when the internet connection is down.  (One can imagine much more compelling situations.)

The records of those transactions, however, should be synced to trusted nodes (e.g. AliceNode) as soon as they can be, and the history should be purged and just the balances carried forward.

Again, this is beyond my scope, but helps the ecosystem for codified legal.  

   



On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 11:26 AM, James Hazard <james.g.hazard@gmail.com> wrote:
Tagging this on to the newly named thread (ignore my other):

I think we are in agreement, but imagining slightly different scenarios.  

If Alice paid BobCo, there would be a record of the payment, originating at  AliceNode and synced to BobCoNode (by push or pull).

BobCo could then issue a certificate of prompt payment to Alice, which would originate at BobCoNode and be synced to AliceNode.  Kind of like an Uber/Lyft/Airbnb rating.

When Alice wanted to demonstrate creditworthiness to Claire, she would create a record in AliceNode and sync it to ClaireNode which authorized ClaireNode to access a permalink at BobCoNode.  Whether AliceNode would also sync this authorization directly with BobCoNode is a technical matter beyond my scope, and perhaps could be done either way.

When ClaireNode actually accessed the record at BobCoNode, BobCo could create a receipt that originated in BobCoNode and was synced to AliceNode and ClaireNode, as desired.

The difference between this and the scenario you describe is mostly that Alice has a record of equal value to the one that BobCo has of her payment, and of BobCo's statement that it was on time.  This maps more or less to email.

A blockchain as sole database seems problematic because of data security, performance constraints and interoperability.  But blockchains might be very useful for keeping a tally of threads of transactions, proof-of-existence validation, etc. 

The permalink could be done by hashing, like in IPFS.

In any event, peer-based transacting would not be based on word processing, and therefore would free the legal profession and system to use standards-based data formats. 

On Adrian's point about PDS, I can imagine that the term carries freight.  I use it merely to mean a database of records created by or synced to a participant.  The git term might be something like a repo, or perhaps a branch, to reflect the fact that the records are understood to be part of something bigger. 


On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 11:19 AM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
There are two ways to get trusted information:
(1) verify a signed claim associated with an identity
(2) present a secure (UMA) token to a resource server you trust

Adrian

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016, Eve Maler <eve.maler@forgerock.com> wrote:
I changed the subject line so as not to be misleading. Hopefully that starts a "new thread" in most everybody's email systems.

I'm still not getting what about "blockchain the technology" helps any of this. Lots of information that is important to an individual -- e.g. credit information, as pointed out below -- must be third-party-asserted to be valuable. We can argue about whether this is/constitutes/contributes to "identity" information or not (in this case, it can be used to help "proof" a digital identity and so on). But the conventional wisdom seems to be hardening around the notions that:
  • It's inefficient, inappropriate, and insecure to store such information by means of DLTs.
  • It's quite often inefficient, inappropriate, and insecure to aggregate such information in a single place away from whoever is authoritative for it. See all the schemes -- federated identity and federated authorization both -- for getting this info fresh by means of attribute transfer and API calls and such. You have to tamper-proof college e-transcripts, income tax forms, identity attributes, etc. that have to pass through intermediary services if you can't arrange for them to be shared directly.
UMA at least tries to let an individual authorize access to data that is asserted by others about them. (That role at the technical level is called "resource owner" after OAuth, but as I always say, I never liked that phrase, property being a bundle of sticks... :-) )

Eve Maler
ForgeRock Office of the CTO | VP Innovation & Emerging Technology
Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl
The ForgeRock Identity Summit is coming to Paris in November!


On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 10:46 AM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
I share Jim's perspective about incremental semantic standards and I'm seeing coherent identity standardization efforts at every level with:

1 - Authentication credentials corresponding to a decentralized identifier (DID), point to 
2 - Secure decentralized identity data objects (DDO), that point to
3 - Identity Containers that issue (W3C) verifiable claims and (UMA) authorization tokens to use
4 - on other resources with my personal data on the Web that are only partially under my control.

Levels 1-3 can be self-sovereign without any federated IDPs.

However, there is absolutely no mention of PDS in any of the forums. The term may be too vague and overloaded to be useful. I hope we can abandon it soon. Identity containers may not be a much better term but at least it allows for a personal authorization server as a component.

Adrian

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016, James Hazard <james.g.hazard@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry, I missed the call, again.  On the west coast for a bit.

I agree with the direction of the conversation.

The essence of a peer-based system is the PDS notion.  Each participant has a first-class copy of the records that touch them.

Those records must be in formats that have common semantics.

Because the world is big and varied (and more top-down is dangerous), the semantics need to be extensible by the participants. The commonality of the semantics does not need to be system-wide, it only needs to be shared as far as the records they relate to.  This makes it possible to do "standards" incrementally. (Open source software iterates from personal project to standard this way.)

Blockchain permits each participant to have a first-class copy, but has major draw backs, particularly that every participant gets a copy of all the records (reason that Corda is not a blockchain) and blockchains have the rigidities of "shared state."  (https://medium.com/@justmoon/the-subtle-tyranny-of-blockchain-91d98b8a3a65#.oupo603xl)

Ideally, each record would be only in the PDSs of the participants that the record directly touches.

To run a "DRY" system, with very little need to have duplicate information about participants, the PDS must be available to respond to appropriate queries.

The records in the PDS could come all via a single protocol, but they could instead come via a variety of protocols.  The participants do need a way to prove records as against one another.  There are a variety of ways to do this, and they don't need to depend on the protocol.

From this perspective, the goal is PDSs with shared record semantics, unlimited extensibility, and a secure method of querying.  Unlimited extensibility is what the "prototype inheritance" model of CommonAccord appears to enable.

That in turn will create an ecosystem for codified legal, which is the goal of CommonAccord. 

 




On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 8:52 AM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
You might find the FAQ useful. 


Adrian

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016, Eve Maler <eve.maler@forgerock.com> wrote:
Adrian-- I'm sorry, it appears you already did send this link to the group! Thanks; action item completed.

Eve Maler
ForgeRock Office of the CTO | VP Innovation & Emerging Technology
Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl
The ForgeRock Identity Summit is coming to Paris in November!


On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 2:06 PM, Adrian Gropper <agropper@healthurl.com> wrote:
We should also consider the place of protocols that support decentralization without neccessarily being either blockchain or smart contracts. For example, W3C Verifiable Claims https://w3c.github.io/webpayments-ig/VCTF/use-cases/ seems to solve a major privacy and centralization problem by enabling triple-blind interactions.

Adrian


On Tuesday, August 30, 2016, Scott L. David <sldavid@uw.edu> wrote:
Jeff - I heartily agree with all the points you raise.

Kind regards,
Scott

Scott L. David

Director of Policy
Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity
University of Washington - Applied Physics Laboratory

Principal Consulting Analyst
TechVision Research

w- 206-897-1466
m- 206-715-0859
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From: j stollman <stollman.j@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2016 10:15:27 AM
To: Scott L. David
Cc: Eve Maler; dg-bsc@kantarainitiative.org
Subject: Re: [DG-BSC] Agenda for BSC telecon Tuesday, August 30 (shortly -- sorry for the late note!)
 
Scott,

Excellent survey.

I would like to further emphasize one of the corollary points you raise:  Perhaps we shouldn't be looking for a distributed organizational "structure" at all.  Instead, we might consider what organizational "processes" would serve the interests involved, and then allow the organizational structure to reveal itself based on the observation and reification of the patterns that emerge from those processes.

In my observations people move rapidly from trying to describe a new solution to using their description to prescribe its use.  Over two years of focus on blockchain technology, I have noticed that it is common for people to recognize that a particular instance of blockchain solves a particular problem and to then falsely conclude that the features of that instantiation are necessary to achieve the same end in other contexts.  For example, we give a lot of lip service to the fact that


--

Adrian Gropper MD

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