• Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    11 months ago

    This is likely from one of the (many) DID specs.

    Which was basically the W3C going like “You want a new spec for shoving arbitrary data and arbitrary protocols into URL-like strings for blockchain-y sorts of reasons? And a seperate spec for each individual case you come up with? Sure go for it! Have fun kids :D”.

    It’s the worst set of specifications I’ve ever looked at, and I’ve read CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1’s non-normative meta viewport parsing algorithm so…

    Since I can’t El Goog search the story it was probably removed from whatever document it was in at some point. I did find the DID Use-Case spec but I couldn’t find this particular story in it. https://www.w3.org/TR/did-use-cases/#uc

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPM
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      11 months ago

      DID is fucking amazing. I spent years following the blockchain identity scam, which is basically to sell centralized management of a “decentralised” identity system, such that you can’t be blamed if it doesn’t work and you get paid.

      Decentralised identity is a scam. Either customer service is possible, meaning central control, or you lose your entire bureaucratic identity when you drop your iphone in a puddle. It turns out the dreams of libertarians are incoherent

      The DID spec is basically not specified - anything that does anything is per-vendor. So for a long time, the only implementation of DID was Microsoft’s, with a hard dependency on an Active Directory server at Azure.

      Bluesky was started by rationalist neoreactionary coiners, so they tried blockchaining. They needed an ID spec and thought “DID’s a spec, right?” The Bluesky (or AT Protocol) implementation is that your ID on their completely decentralised social network - decentralisation coming real soon! - is not name@server, but a hash stored at a central server that Bluesky runs. Now you might think that Bluesky’s completely decentralised social network has extremely centralised control of a very important aspect of things. Bluesky’s implementation has no blockchainery left to it - but they directly credit the dumb W3C spec.

      • self@awful.systems
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        11 months ago

        the fucking DID spec! for some reason I spent a weekend drinking and reading the DID spec and one of its even worse offshoots and it’s all filler. the offshoot spec spent more time describing the icon compliant apps should use than anything technical! and lately I keep seeing DID get dug up by random people trying to get it shoved into activitypub for no reason! the fucking things the crypto fuckers did to technical writing… and now the AI fuckers are doing even worse to scientific writing