Dealing with imposters on the web is a big problem, whether it be through phishing to try and sucker us into giving up our passwords to financial websites or running out comments under other people’s names. It’s encouraging that some creative minds are trying to come up with solutions.

I wonder if we’ll ever have a global digital ID system that is immune to cracking? Perhaps something with DNA in it? Add a drop of blood or strand of hair to formulate a unique key? Identity theft in the future will become even more problematic as we continue to rely more and more on machines. We’re already seeing these problems manifesting.

While the following doesn’t really solve the problems mentioned above, it’s a small step in the right direction, and allows you to see what kind of snowflake-like identicon your IP address block represents. Don Park whipped up some 9-block IP identification code in Java that he is demoing in his blog comments area and explains:

The derivative is currently first four bytes of SHA1(IP + salt). Since dynamic IPs change, you’ll see 9-blocks change over time for a particular user. But it doesn’t seem to change often enough to affect IP identification within typical comment activity clusters. I could reduce this problem by changing the derivative to SHA1(CIDR(IP) + salt) but CIDR blocks could get pretty big. I am looking into ways (i.e. identify router-level blocks) to solve this problem

In Don’s comments he adds that a 9-block can be generated with the following code:
http://www.docuverse.com/blog/9block?code={32-bit integer}&size={16…64}

The Java source code for this project is available and Don encourages others to port to other languages with his “go nuts with it” licensing. Somebody will crank out a PHP port using GD or Imagemagick and not far behind will be an MT or Wordpress plugin meaning that this could be an additional way bloggers could offer their commenters some element of additional unique identification beyond the name typed in a form and signature URL.

A commenter, David, mentions favatars which use the domain favicon as an avatar, another neat way to add some personalization to a comment.

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