Uniting ID systems together
Mike Jones (of Microsoft) reports (on the meta-identity maillist) that:
Today - at Novell’s BrainShare conference Novell demonstrated an Open Source Identity selector on the Macintosh and Linix hat supports the same Information Cards as Windows Cardspace (and more, such as cards backed by OpenID.)
See Dale Olds’ post http://virtualsoul.org/blog/2007/03/23/all-your-infocard-are-belong-to-us/ describing the Open Source Identity Selector demonstrated today and Pat Felsted’s post http://www.whoireallyam.com/?p=51 showing a screen shot.
Congratulations to the Bandit and Higgins project members who made this tremendous achievement possible! This is certainly evidence of the Identity Big Bang in action!
— Mike
OH MY GOD! What a historic day! Congrats to all - I’m totally jazzed about these developments!
Especially if you take Michal Migurski’s comments to heart:
“Anyone who is pooh-poohing the importance of a single, unified, unique key for all individual information across the internet just plain isn’t thinking.”
I don’t pooh-pooh its /importance/, I just think it’s a door left wide open to terrifying abuses of privacy, both accidental and malicious.
Its gonna take some serious, adult strength ID management code (from Microsoft, IBM, Novell and other interested entities) combined with our user-centric community to make this all happen. I just don’t see a bunch of small startups pulling this off. So this is one case where large companies participating in open standards evolution - as a good thing.
That should quell Michal and anyone else’s fears about holes, leaks and privacy challanges.
What we have right now is that the large companies are listening to us about privacy, governance, entitlement, attribute exchange and interop - we’ve made huge strides. So lets enjoy this moment - now that it’s a proven fact that disparate ID systems can work together in a meta-identity environment.
March 24th, 2007 at 1:19 am
marc one question, why would people want their social network identities tied together? i mean - your average joe kind of wants his linkedin and myspace and plentyoffish identities separate if you ask me.
March 24th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
“Its gonna take some serious, adult srength ID management code (from Microsoft, IBM andNovell other interested entities) combined with our user-centric community to make this all happen. I just don’t see a bunch of small starups pulling this off.”
The technology for serious encryption is freely available, but big companies don’t necessarily have a bulletproof reputation for keeping secrets (e.g. ChoicePoint). So I don’t think code is the issue. I like Bruce Schneier’s core suggestion for handling identity theft - if you want a party to show responsibility for secrets kept, make them (financially) liable for screwups. One way to clarify liability is to ensure that each *user* of an OpenID provider is the recognized legal owner of his or her information and history. If providers were stewards of that information instead of owners, I can imagine that there’d be less temptation to sell or fuck with the data, and more incentive to take care of it.
Actually, this would be lovely for all sorts of reasons. Maybe last.fm’s database backstabbery could have been prevented? http://www.last.fm/forum/21604/_/239661
March 24th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
[…] Chadblog asks: marc one question, why would people want their social network identities tied together? i mean - […]
March 27th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
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March 29th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Identity Mesh
The ability to have a single id for signing on to any network service has reached critical mass for developers large and small via OpenID. This is HUGE - a big win for everyone eventually. Marc Cantor captures a key part of it:
OH MY GOD! What a hi…