Posted 9:24 AM (0) comments

Happy Holidays!

Posted 5:00 PM (3) comments

54" 40' or fight!

It would be easier to just annex the old Oregon Territory if Microsoft really wants to corner the market on Canadian Identity gurus.

Kim Cameron quotes fellow Canuck Jackson Shaw (and also former Microsoftie) on the acquisition by Redmond of Vancouver's own Dick Hardt.

I think Dick will be good for Microsoft. I think that - as his marriage approaches - Microsoft could be good for him.

It's just that I think the software Behemoth of the northwest might be getting too much of a flavor of the Great White North. Next thing you know there'll be a Tim Horton's on campus!

Still, at least I know I'll have someone to talk hockey with next time I visit the campus...

Congrats all around!

Posted 9:13 AM (1) comments

Please show me your identity

In today's newsletter I alluded to a language problem in an IBM press release, intending to delve deeper in the next issue. I'm not going to be able to do that but still wanted to point out the egregious error, so I'll do that here. In talking about IBM's partnership with multi-factor, strong authentication partners (Arcot, Gemalto, and L-1 Identity Solutions ), the release states:

"Billions of identities used in business and social networking environments – ranging from passwords, employee badges, driver’s licenses and stronger forms of authentication – are used each day to complete various types of transactions both on-line and in-person, granting individuals a wide range of physical and digital access privileges."

Passwords, employee badges, and driver’s licenses aren't identities! They're credentials. They're offered as proofs of identity claims, but that's all. Calling them identities is like calling a key a "lock." In fact, they are usually offered, in a digital context, as authentication to an account (not an identity) since one identity (you) can have multiple accounts using one or more credentials, and one account can be accessed by multiple people (or, identities) just as one key can open multiple locks, and one lock can be opened by multiple keys.

If those of us "inside" can't get the terms right, how can we ever expect the end-users to do so?

Labels: digital identity

Posted 10:57 AM (0) comments

Understanding Geneva

Kuppinger-Cole's Felix Gaehtgens is posting from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) about the just announced platform called "Geneva". Read the article for sure, but Felix also thinks, as he wrote to me, "...most people really don't 'get it' (even a lot of the other analysts, press people and developers keep mixing up concepts). " So in an attempt to clear up the confusion, he'll be hosting a Webinar this Friday to explain it all.

It's planned so that most people will have daylight access (8:30 AM PST / 11:30 AM EST / 4:30 PM CET) - well, except for the Asia-Pacific region, but I'm sure it will be archived for them.

Geneva, the successor to Active Directory Federation Services, is without a doubt the most important Identity announcement Microsoft has ever made.

Unfortunately, it won't ship for at least a year.

If you can get your hands on an early release, do so. In the meantime, listen to Felix' webinar.

Other good readings on Geneva:

Mike Jones
Pam Dingle
Don Schmidt
Vittorio Bertocci
Gerry Gebel

Labels: ADFS, cardspace, Geneva, Microsoft, Zermatt

Posted 2:11 PM (0) comments

Paul's Desert Island Rule

Paul Madsden has come up with an easy to grasp "Occam's razor" style explanation of what is - and what isn't - "reputation." He posits the Desert Island Rule, which is a:

"...test for whether a given attribute can have a reputation aspect.

Were the entity in question to be located on a desert island with no social contact with others, would the value of the attribute in question be impacted?"

That captures my sense of the notion, also.

Labels: reputation

Posted 12:51 AM (0) comments

IIW Fall 2008

Only a bit over a month until the fall edition of the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. It's an always interesting event:

Venues for enterprise identity practitioners

Internet Identity Workshop throws up the question of what's next in identity? - Network ...

The geeks' identity incubator

Identity experts gather at Internet Identity Workshop

I'll be there - you should be too.

Posted 9:40 PM (0) comments

Makes me look nice...

The Register's Ted Dziuba makes me look like a group-hugging flower-child with his latest story ("OpenSocial, OpenID, and Google Gears: Three technologies for history's dustbin"):

"What about OpenID, the best damned federated authentication scheme the world has ever seen, but nobody in the world can figure out how to use?"

or

"This situation gets really dangerous when you start to involve people from San Francisco. Every person who lives in San Francisco has the intention of starting a nonprofit organization of some sort. Therefore, if you collect a bunch of Web 2.0 engineers in San Francisco, the inevitable outcome is the OpenSocial Foundation: a nonprofit organization that only exists to support an API for programming social network applications."

Peace and love, children.

Labels: Google, openid, social networks