Edit: I've PGP-signed this comment to prove my point. Here's my public key: https://gist.github.com/1803486

You can verify the signature of this message, and know for certain that the person who controls the "cheald" github account rubberstamped the contents of this message as originating from him. Neither GitHub nor Hacker News controls that identity; they are simply conduits to convey the identity link. Of course, you can still take this comment, strip the signature, and repost it, thereby denying GitHub user cheald credit for the message.

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This is the same ReadWriteWeb writer who got his panties in a twist that someone took parts of a story he wrote, pasted it on Google+ without attribution, and then ranked higher in Google for the headline [1][2].

Despite the grandiose pontificating about how we should own our identities (a sentiment I agree with, FWIW), I'm pretty sure that Jon's entire impetus behind this idea is this snippet:

> Identity on the Internet should be embedded by the user like a fingerprint. It should be written into the digital material we make using hardware we have authorized...We want this because it would simplify problems of attribution and copyright on the Web. If we didn't sign something we created, it would default to the other ways we deal with unsigned content. But content that is signed would have an unmistakable origin.

Jon's butthurt that people can copy his bytes, post them somewhere else, and he doesn't get credit for them. That's understandable - content creators should be credited for their creations, after all - but what Jon's talking about -whether he realizes it or not - is DRM for textual web content. Pardon me while I laugh my ass off.

The problem is inherently unsolvable. Textual content as it works on the web is literally impossible to protect from copying without attribution without gutting and redesigning the entire internet from the ground up.

If you want to tell other people that something you wrote is indeed from you, sign it with your private key and publish your public key for verification. Create as many keys ("identity facets") as you want. Associate any given key with any given online persona you want. Boom, problem solved with technology that we've had for the last 36 years. Verification of identity is not a difficult problem anymore, chain-of-trust issues notwithstanding.

But it doesn't solve the problem that Jon wants solved, which is that I can still take his content, strip the signature, and repost it, and nobody will be able to recognize that that content is his. Just as in the Real World, I can hear someone tell a joke, and then turn around and tell the joke over dinner without attribution to the original author, I can copy a string of bytes on the internet and republish them as my own without including a link back to the author. That's simply the nature of information flow.

The problem is unsolvable, and down the path of trying to solve it lies DRM madness. It's a Bad Idea, and it's a little dismaying that a technology writer would even suggest it to begin with.

[1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_is_going_to_mess...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3424457

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