Posted 10:51 AM (0) comments

Is there a future for OpenID?

Johannes Ernst, one of the founders of OpenID (and the OpenID Foundation) has just posted a thought provoking piece about the present state - and the future - of that protocol ("Is OpenID Still User-Centric?")

I've pointed out before the problems between the OpenID evangelists (typically folks who do their own implementations, support open source projects and bemoan corporate or commercial involvement) and the major web organizations (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, et al) who have adapted OpenID to their own purposes.

This is the often unspoken but nevertheless almost inevitable path that any successful open source project follows.

Perhaps it's time to truly fork the project. Let the "big boys" continue on with their "NASCAR billboards", PKI and whatever other baggage they want to heap on top of the simple protocol. Let the open source evangelists take the simplicity that was OpenID 1.1 and re-style it to it's original purpose - locking in the development stream so that the aggrandizement can't happen again. It's not too late, and the upcoming IIW would be a good place to talk about it.

Labels: IIW, open source, openid

Posted 12:33 PM (0) comments

Getting Privacy Right

The Burton Group's Bob Blakley writes ("Gartner Gets Privacy Dead Wrong") a seminal piece on privacy - what it is, what it isn't and how to protect it. In the course of his blog entry he manages to pretty much dismiss most of the work that's been done under the rubric of "privacy" (which, as he notes, is really about secrecy) over the past dozen years.

As he writes: "That's how privacy works; it's not about secrecy, and it's not about control: it's about sociability. Privacy is a social good which we give to one another, not a social order in which we control one another."

It's an issue I've brought up a number of times in the past. Last year, for example, I discussed where many "...have gone wrong is to equate privacy with anonymity. You don’t have to be anonymous to maintain the privacy of your data. Again going back 100 years when you went into the bar and everybody knew your name there was also much about you that wasn’t known. Most things about you, in fact, weren’t known. Those things we want to keep private - our medical data, financial data, legal situation, etc. - were kept private. But people did know who you were, and perhaps where you lived, or worked, who your family was - and no one thought that was strange."

Secrecy and anonymity are not privacy, and the quicker we all understand that the quicker we can move to protect privacy.

Labels: Burton Group, privacy, social networks

Posted 9:43 AM (0) comments

Tell us what you really feel...

In an Open Letter to Steve Ballmer, Craig Burton rants about the ridiculous policy Microsoft has for controlling updates and enhancements:

As we drove further down to path to understand why, we were told the following unbelievable conversation. (The following is not an exact quote, but close.)

Changes like you are requesting can only happen in an “in-band” release of Windows. These sort of changes are prohibited from going out in the Tuesday updates. What goes out with in-band releases the Tuesday updates is controlled by—Steve Ballmer.

Well F*&% me. Dude, after all of these years, you are still micro managing the Windows release! Now I know why Microsoft is now been relegated to insignificance in the identity market. The reason is simple. Internal policy, managed by you, prohibits product mangers from keeping up with trends and innovation.

And what was the momentous change Burton was asking about?

In our meeting, we discussed how many man hours it would take to modify CardSpace to support context-automation. The answer is a few days of work at the most. When asked how long before such a simple change would find its way into CardSpace, the answer came back as two years at best, maybe.

Unfortunately, Ballmer has never understood the importance of identity to the fabric of computing, so he's never going to permit what he would perceive as "feature creep" in the regular monthly updates. That's good news for Microsoft's competitors, and bad news for it's customers.

Labels: Burton, cardspace, metasystem, Microsoft, rant