Sun Announces Passport Competitor

mjankows writes: "Sun, and other people today announced the Liberty Alliance Project. Definitely an answer to passport/hailstorm. Maybe Mono/DotGNU can benefit/assist/use/help this..." Yay, yet another way to be tracked on the Internet.

Comments

Great!

[jiheison]

Two versions of software that no one wants to use! Thank god for competition!

Re:That means

[Captain_Frisk]

Ellison is Oracle. They are pushing a national ID card. Thats evil too, but not mentioned in the scope of this article.

As for this hailstorm stuff... i really think you guys are overreacting. Right now there are lots of people who have your user information. This is only one more, and hopefully only has one fail point.

Right now, you have all of your information replicated all over the place, meaning that you trust that many people with your data. All you need is one of them not patching an exploit, and bam, your data is gone. Why have multiple points of potential failure when you can just have one?

Since you can control how much info you give them, (MS Passport only requires email address) and now they are saying that there will be many different people who store it, so you don't even have to give it to MS.

Sun is just a poor MS wannabee. They see that MS has got something that will make the AVERAGE (don't forget how important this is) users experience more convienient, and thus pleasurable, and they want in on it.

Captain_Frisk

Liberty Alliance Project is offensive

[stefanlasiewski]

Sun, and other people today announced the Liberty Alliance Project

In related news:

Sun has renamed their project 'Enduring Tracking Project'.

The change was made after the initial name -- ``Liberty Alliance Project'' -- last week ran into objections from some Linux scholars on grounds that only Open Source, or GNU, could mete out Liberty in their view.

(this is a joke. And it shows no respect to those of the FreeBSD or other open source licenses ;)

Someone might look at the page before posting

[PCM2]

This, from the Libery Alliance FAQ:

Q: What are the objectives of the Liberty Alliance Project?
A: The Alliance has three main objectives. 1) To enable consumers and businesses to maintain personal information securely. 2) To provide a universal, open standard for single sign-on with decentralized authentication and open authorization from multiple providers. 3) To provide an open standard for network identity spanning all network-connected devices.

Q: Who are the members of the Liberty Alliance Project? A: Charter members include ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, OpenWave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Schlumberger, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign, Vodafone and More.

...

So it seems it's more than just a Sun effort, and they claim it's not about another company holding onto everyone's personal info. The goal appears to be a method for single sign-on where each individual company maintains customer data relevant to its own business. They describe it as a decentralized, federated system built on an open standard.

More than just "being tracked"

[SysKoll]

Michael writes:
Yay, yet another way to be tracked on the Internet

Well, a tool such as Passport or LAP can be used to track users, that's true. No one said tools cannot be misused. But remember: Programs don't track people, marketdroids do.

The keyword here is convenience. The only way of protecting our information on the Internet is through encryption. Which implies passwords and key management. Something that 99% of users are not willing to do.

Unfortunately, this unwillingness to use the Net securely affects all of us. Cool products and services that could be available today are not offered because of lack of good security models. If they are offered at all, they are either too cumbersome to use, or rely on such simplistic security that they cannot be trusted (Hotmail anyone?)

This is an old problem. An analog is the credit card industry. Even if you carefully protect your credit card info, you're still paying for all the people who get their CC number and expiry date stolen. CC companies past the cost to all of us clients.

So we need ease of use for security products, or they won't get used. If LAP can spread the use of a safe, easy-to-use, one-time Internet-wide authentication, then it's welcome.

Did anyone notice that French company Gemplus is among the LAP supporters? This company provides smart cards. Several projects touting smart cards for web authentication have already been proposed. Maybe we'll see a new, more successful approach this time. It's certainly easier to carry a smart card and enter a 4-digit PIN than to remember and type 20 different passwords.

I am not saying that this new LAP initiative is going to solve all authentication and privacy problems. But these problems are real and need to be addressed. It doesn't boil down just to marketdroid tracking us.

-- SysKoll