neat lj feature

as i was commenting on a friends lj i noticed an option for something called openid on a post. having nothing better to do i looked it up. its a new lj feature(and internet feature) that lets people that comment specify a url. if the specified url also supports openid(and its a url they are actually associated with) they can set it up so that the url validates who they are. Eg. I am john doe i dont have an lj but i want to comment on your blog. but you dont like anonamous posters because they can claim to be anyone. so instead i give you a link to my website. I then go to my website and tell the openid to authorize for your blog. you now know for certain(well barring being hacked) that i am john doe from whatever url i listed.

This is a neat feature it reminds me of something i read in a book called ender's game by orson scott card. in it the government has created genius children. Ender and his brother and sister are such children. While ender is away Ender's brother and sister decide they want to go into politics. The only thing is they're children and even though they are hyper intellegent and think they can(and they do) make a positive difference in the government. So they start sending editorials to newspapers on the books futuristic version of the internet. To stop other people from pretending to be them they set up a special account that they send everything from via some kind of electronic key. Eventually they even get paid to this account but because its a fake account they cant ever actually send stuff directly to themselves or recieve money. Instead they use the money out in cyberspace to further their careers.

this feature is like also something i read online once about a project to restore anonymity to the net while retaining(and improving) the abillity to see who has said what. It worked like this. You logged into the client and can browse things within this internet inside the internet. while logged on everything is masked except an electronic certificate you have. It's an encrypted signature stamped to every post and e-mail you make so that everyone knows its really you who said whatever it was you said (but its not tracable directly back to your computer). Meanwhile your ip and mac addresses aren't logged. At a time when there is no anonymity left on the net I can't help but wish they'd finished the project (i dont even remember where it was so maybe they did).

Granted openid doesnt accomplish returning anonymity in any way shape or form but it could potentially weed out some of those annoying posters on forums who claim to work for this company or that but say stupid crap that obviously isnt true. Its a step in the right direction and is perhaps one of the best internet innovations(not including the as yet unopened to the public internet2) since gnutella(the file sharing protocol that gave us nice things like bear share and kazaa).