Hi all, I've been working incredibly hard of late to put the finishing touches on a new independent non-profit organization called the XNS Public Trust Organization or XNSORG (I'm the president). XNSORG's task is provide legal, technical, and governance maintenance for what I believe is a truly compelling new Internet technology that has the potential to affect each and every person on the Internet. I'll provide a synopsis below, and I would encourage you to read my full article about it in TidBITS Tuesday morning, but since a major aspect of XNS is a new naming system, I wanted to alert you all so you could be assured of getting the exact personal name you want before someone else does (obviously, the more unusual your name, the less likely there is to be a conflict). Please feel free to forward this along to friends who might also want to sign up quickly. Starting at 7 AM Eastern on Monday morning, XNS name registration will be open. The first million names are free, and all you need to enter initially is your current email address (you can add as much more or little information later as you want). I strongly encourage you to get a name right away, and you can then start linking electronic business cards (with permanent, synchronized links) with other people with XNS names. Obviously, you can get any name you want (and you can register multiple names, though the second and so on will cost $12 per year), but I recommend you think fairly carefully about this decision since XNS names are meant to be permanent. So if you get ImaWanker as your name, you might regret being stuck with it much later on. My name is just "Adam Engst" or actually, in XNS parlance "=Adam Engst". Go to <http://www.xns.org/services/> or <http://www.onename.com/> at 7 AM Eastern or later to sign up. Believe me, this is cool and it's going to get even more cool as time goes on. Enough. I want to get this out while you still have a chance of seeing it first thing Monday morning. Please excuse me if I can't explain more right now or if I'm bad about replying later - I've received over 200 messages and sent over 100 today in the process of trying to finalize our legal documents during more than 12 straight hours of work today without a break, and I'm closing in on total brain fry... cheers... -Adam --- Here's the broad overview. XNS (eXtensible Name Service) is a new technology developed by a Seattle startup called OneName Corporation to enable Internet users and businesses to exchange data in an automated, privacy-protected fashion. It's based entirely on Internet standards like HTTP and XML, and the source will be completely available (or rather, it will be once it's cleaned up and prepped - the end result is legally required, but practical realities prevent it from happening Day 1). Along with all those hip buzzwords and phrases, what really sets XNS apart from all the other proprietary technologies you've heard about is that OneName is licensing the patent that governs this technology to a newly formed non-profit, the XNS Public Trust Organization, or XNSORG for short. As a technology, XNS has two basic parts. First is the web agent technology that enables individuals and business to share information, creating permanent links that can withstand the rigors of new email addresses, physical moves, and so on. The cool thing is that every link is governed by a legally enforceable privacy contract aimed at reducing the privacy abuses that have gotten such press of late. Second, XNS has a next-generation naming system (how else can you find and link to these web agents?) that is designed to avoid all the problems with DNS, both in terms of the size of the namespace and the huge intellectual property issues that have come up. Fine and nice, but what can XNS be used for? What about a single sign-in at every Web site that supports XNS? No more trying to remember multiple usernames and passwords for every Tom.com, Dick.com, and Harry.com. What about eliminating spam by requiring all new correspondents to agree to your privacy policy before allowing their mail through? (I'm especially jazzed by that one, since I've found the legal recourse, even with the WA state law, painful at best.) What about an address book that's never out of date? Or a button that fills in the standard information every ecommerce site asks for, and ensures that a privacy contract is attached to every transaction? The key to it all is XNSORG, which is a non-profit tasked with coordinating the maintenance of the XNS technology and creating a governance structure for the XNS community (we're getting some help from the Center for Democracy and Technology - CDT - on this). XNSORG will do things like establish technical and operational specifications for the system to ensure quality of service, design a dispute resolution system to handle breaches of privacy contracts and other disputes, and organize working groups to extend the capabilities of the system. I've put my effort where my mouth is and have been working non-stop for a while now heading up XNSORG. I don't know of such a situation on the Internet where an intellectual property holder hands over a patent and all their source code to a non-profit that answers only to the Internet community. I won't pretend we have all the answers, but we're trying hard to get a 1.0 out there on the 25th for feedback and comment, at which point XNSORG and its responsibilities will shift to meet the desires of the community. You can read more at <http://www.xns.org/>, though some things are still drafts or stubs there. If you're at all interested in privacy, I especially recommend the P3P, XNS, and Internet Privacy white paper that's linked on the home page. ______________________________________________________________________ Adam C. Engst, XNSORG President <ace@xns.org> <http://www.xns.org> TidBITS <ace@tidbits.com> <http://www.tidbits.com/> --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'