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Comment by sdfx | Hacker News Reader

Since I knew I'd be seeing Alan Kay at Rebooting Computing, I decided to verify his Stack Overflow usage in person. [...]

We then proceeded to discuss how it's sad that identity is still hard online.

Couldn't this be solved, at least for the tech-savvy crowd, by beeing able to sign an openID-account with a PGP-Signature? This way you could "prove" that your openID belongs to you, the same way you can prove the authenticity of an email right now.

The problem with this is that openID is no fun right now and the last thing that is needed is more complexity. But at least Jeff would be able to know whether or not Alan Kay really posted on his page.

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Hence solving the problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing an openid) with a real person by the much simpler problem of associating a random set of symbols (representing a public key) with a real person.

Ah yes, but you've tremendously reduced the problem.

With PGP you can verify all online posting, so you reduce the problem to a singular instance: public key vs real person.

That is a huge improvement.

At least public key certification was designed and is used for this for quite some time. It works reasonably well for email and there is an infrastructure to manage and validate the public keys. With openID you'd have to start from scratch.

What an ironic comment.

That's not even an issue here. Alan Kay, or at least the user Alan Kay on Stack Overflow, is still an "Unregistered User", which means that he hasn't linked his user account with an OpenID. It also means that if his cookies are deleted, he won't be able to get back into the account without manual intervention from Jeff.

So anyway, why not a startup that provides the same service as Amazon's "real name" tag?

You hook into my startup, I charge the user a fee on their credit card, verify their name, confirm the name to you.

You have a user with a valid ID without having to deal with openid or credit card handling, I have a startup with income, the user has a proven ID which they will value because they paid for it.

Sounds good.

Jeff's comment is all very well - he asks for the problem to be solved so he can see who someone else is...

I take it sdfx isn't your real name? How many people really want this 'solved' for themselves?

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