At Blockchain Commons, we design open infrastructure that prioritizes privacy, autonomy, and human dignity. That’s why I support and personally signed the No Phone Home Initiative. It is not just a position, it’s a call to preserve a foundational principle of decentralized identity: Credentials must be verifiable without enabling surveillance! Why “No Phone Home” Matters The problem is simple: when verifying a digital credential such as a mobile driver’s license or a diploma, many s...| Blockchain Commons
This document specifies Version 1.0 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. The TLS protocol provides communications privacy over the Internet. The protocol allows client/server applications to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery.| IETF Datatracker
I recently wrote about “How My Values Inform Design”. There I discussed the issue of autonomy and how it can be supported by progressive trust, proof ag...| Life With Alacrity
ABSTRACT: By grounding technical decisions in ethical values, we can create compassionate digital architectures. This article examines how core human va...| Life With Alacrity
This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the United Nations in New York, I wrote “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, the article that described the ten precepts of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and provided the name that defined our ecosystem. Eight and a half years later, I ask the SSI community to reflect on a difficult question, one that challenges the very foundation of SSI. Has...| Life With Alacrity
This article was originally published as an advance reading for RWOT12 in Köln, Germany on August 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited for this reprint. ABSTRACT: Self-sovereign identity represents an innovative new architecture for identity management. But, we must ensure that it avoids the pitfalls of previous identity systems. During World War II, two identity pioneers, the Dutch Jacobus L. Lentz and the French René Carmille, took different approaches toward the collection and recording ...| Life With Alacrity
