onfocus

Jacques Distler is doing more work on the PGP-enabled comments idea. He's taken the signature method a step farther by showing how you can do automatic validation. By placing a PGP-key, auto-discovery <link> tag in your weblog (just like the auto-discovery tags for RSS, FOAF, etc.) that contains the URL of your public PGP-key, anyone should be able to validate anyone else's signature using just their weblog URL.

What this all boils down to is that you can build a distributed system for verifying identity in weblog comments. And your weblog becomes your central identity for all of your web contributions. Those who want to protect their identity can take the extra steps to use PGP and add the auto-discovery tag to their weblog, and those who want to remain anonymous or don't care about their identity can keep using weblog comments as they work now. There are no extra logins required, and no changes to the way you post/read comments.

Check out Jacque's post on the subject that explains how it all works in more detail: PGP-Signed Comments. (And his follow-up post: Notes on Comment Authentication.) He's working with Srijith, author of the Movable Type plugin OpenPGPComments, to add these auto-validation ideas into the next version of the plugin. I just added my pgp auto-discovery tag to this site. (Once I see their implementation of auto-validation, I'll see if I can incorporate it into the comments system here.)

As you probably know, Portland is issuing licenses for same-sex marriages. I've been reading the news and reactions obsessively over at ORblogs, and b!X has a nice local weblog round-up of reaction. I'm glad to see pictures starting to be posted. Frykitty pointed to some wedding pictures from yesterday. If anyone has photos but no place to post them on the web, ORblogs has a publicly available photo section.

ooh, ooh, I need one of these T-Shirts: Vote, F*cker.

If you can't get enough pictures of baby animals, check out these hilariously cute newborn kittens. [via offhand remarks]

Getting a puppy has made me trigger happy with the camera. There's plenty more where this came from.

This looks like the sort of hardware hacking I could accomplish: iPod battery pack. [via teedlo] I need to build this before my next road trip—the usual 8-9 hours of iPod battery life just isn't enough sometimes. It'd be great to have this backup.

huh. Tucows bought Blogrolling. It's surprising to me that ancillary weblog services are also being bought and sold. [via manly knitting]

b!X over at Portland Communique is asking his readers for ideas related to funding his weblog. I think he provides a valuable service for Portland, and there should be a way for him to turn his hobby into a living. He's focusing on potential grants, and I have no idea if there's anything out there for him. I don't think Google Ads are the answer in his case, because he doesn't have a consumer-product oriented weblog. Paypal tips are an option, but I've found people aren't used to supporting the independent web this way yet. I think this an important question to find an answer to—not just for b!X, but also for the larger world of potential citizen journalists.

We now resume our broadcast in full color. As you were.

This site is a little more grey than usual for Grey Tuesday. I'm not even a big hip-hop fan, and honestly the DJ Dangermouse Grey Album just made me want to hear the White Album again. But I think copyright laws stifle art and speech—and the laws make it next to impossible to comment on our own culture. The Grey Album is illegal art, but it shouldn't be.

There's more on the legal maneuverings surrounding this protest at waxy.org.

By the way, if you buy anything at Amazon through the Weblog Bookwatch (or MediaWatch) links today, the affiliate fees will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Others: Kottke, Matt Haughey, BoingBoing, SixFoot6, Lawrence Lessig, Scott Andrew.

This weekend Ernest gave Matt and me an inside look at Bigha bikes here in Corvallis. (Ernest put together their website.) Hopping on one of them was a bit like learning to ride a bike all over again, but after a few seconds to adapt I was steering around the factory floor fairly well. It's definitely more comfortable than a standard bike, and I can see that it would be very nice for long rides. These top of the line bikes are a bit out of my price range, and I hope someone rents them around here—it'd be fun to take one out for a day and go on a longer trip. (I guess I could always try to win one.) I took a few pictures while we were there:


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