Phil Windley's Technometria

A Map of the Manifold Environment

Summary: A reader asked for a map of the whole Manifold environment and the functional capabilities of each part.

Aug 5 • Phil Windley

Using Home Assistant with Manifold

Summary: Manifold is evolving into a proper framework for building meshes of picos, and Home Assistant gives those meshes an interface.

Aug 3 • Phil Windley

July 2026

Identity for the Pico Engine

Summary: Version 1.5 of the Pico Engine finally brings identity into the engine itself: passkeys for humans, and OAuth for external apps and webhooks.

Jul 14 • Phil Windley

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The Shape of Context in Agentic Authorization

Summary: In agentic systems, the principal, action, and resource are often unknown until the moment an agent acts, and the context that governs the…

Jul 6 • Phil Windley

1

June 2026

Manifold API and Sensor Network: Two New Repos

Summary: Cleaning up manifold-api as a prerequisite for the spring conversational interface capstone turned into a complete platform update: Pico Engine…

Jun 9 • Phil Windley

AI Integration in Picos Starts with Events

Summary: Picos already have persistent identity, owned state, and an event-driven architecture—exactly the properties that make a good substrate for AI…

Jun 2 • Phil Windley

Internet Identity Workshop XLII Report

Summary: IIW XLII brought 287 people to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for three days of sessions on identity, agents, and the legal and…

Jun 1 • Phil Windley

4

May 2026

Enhance, Duplicate, or Replace? None of the Above.

Summary: Alan Mayo frames the digital identity design choice as enhance, duplicate, or replace, and places Utah’s SEDI in the “replace” bucket alongside…

May 20 • Phil Windley

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April 2026

Data Protection Missed the Point; Loyalty Gets It Right

Summary SEDI’s duty of loyalty provision shifts the basis for regulating online interaction from the data to the relationship.

Apr 30 • Phil Windley

1

MyTerms and SEDI's Duty of Loyalty

Summary: MyTerms, the new IEEE 7012 standard, gives individuals a protocol for proposing terms to websites as first parties.

Apr 27 • Phil Windley

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Building a Conversational Interface for Manifold with MCP and Picos

Summary GUIs are dead—at least for most user experiences.

Apr 22 • Phil Windley

1

March 2026

It's Not Just What Agents Can Do...It's When They Can Do It!

Summary: Agents don’t just perform actions; they execute plans where the safety of each step depends on what has already happened.

Mar 30 • Phil Windley

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