Identicon

Invention

Releases

Applications

• One use is embedding them in wiki pages and blog comments to identify authors. The thought includes protecting an author from someone else using their name to comment. It would be obvious because, in those cases where the ISPs provide unique instead of dynamic IPs, the IP addresses would generate different Identicons.
• Third-party software is available to generate identicons for the purposes of identifying eBay sellers.
• The original Identicon idea has been expanded to include a couple of new, simple yet very effective, anti-phishing protection schemes. One of them requires client-side support; Park is interested in talking to browser vendors regarding its incorporation. He calls this expansion "Gemini."
• There is an add-on for Firefox called IdentFavIcon Quantum that, on web pages without favicons, replaces them in the tab with Identicons based on the IP of the page.
• Anonymous email forwarding service IdBloc uses Identicons to help quickly distinquish between different email addresses visually