Identity (was Re: If you wondered why Intel sucks on Fedora read this)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 18:41 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:

> If you're part of a well-known team, and you want your own website that 
> reflects the work you do as part of that team, make sure your choice of 
> domain name (maybe keithp.developer.intel.com or 
> keithp.people.freedesktop.org). Intel might prefer to use another domain 
> name entirely - intelgraphics.org - that's fine too. It carries the 
> company logo, the regular Intel site links to it.

Shan't. Your logic does not convince me. I moved from Mandriva to Red
Hat; should I move my blog also? Should I have three blog sites, one for
Mandriva-related stuff (which I still sometimes write about), one for
Red Hat, one for other topics? No, thanks. My blog is *my* blog, I'll
host it in my space.

> The site looks legitimate, but it could be a well-crafted hoax.

This is a well-known problem on the Internet. It's hardly credible to
argue that the solution should be "everyone have their blog hosted by
their employer". In absence of a truly
perfect-yet-still-somehow-not-privacy-invading internet ID system, you
use common sense and prudence. It's pretty easy to establish that Keith
Packard is a leading X.org contributor - a brief perusal of the commit
logs tells you that - and the chance of someone establishing a site
pretending to be his site, for the purposes of publishing
plausible-sounding yet misleading synposes of X.org driver development
progress (to...what end, exactly?) is close to zero. Yes, it's not *at*
zero, so with your tin foil hat on, you can't believe that site is
actually run by the same person (or three-headed lizard) who makes code
contributions to X.org. But it's close enough for government work.

Hell, I doubt you've personally verified the GPG signatures of anyone
who posts to this list, so you don't know who we all are. Unless you
reply to this message and ask me to verify it - and you trust that
no-one's hacked into my Red Hat email account - you've no idea this
email really comes from me (and, of course, to you, 'Adam Williamson' is
a pretty nebulous concept, if you think about it). But most people are
happy to work on that assumption...

I really think you're attaching far too much importance to an issue that
doesn't practically rear its head much, and not thinking too hard about
your proposed solution.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net