Liberty Alliance Gains Momentum

kabanossen writes "News.com reports that AOL is joining the Liberty Alliance, which is a coalition of tech companies who are creating an alternative to Microsoft's Passport. Other members of the alliance are Sun, Nokia, Real Networks and General Motors "This provides a common language for authentication to ensure no one company controls the single authentication network" said a rep. " Mmmm...open standards. Hopefully.

Comments

Banks! (if you trust them)

[reachinmark]

There was a newspaper article today in Sweden announcing that next years tax returns could be submitted via the internet. To secure the connection, the three tax related government bodies would require a special identity certificate... that can only be provided (and verified) by your bank.

The bottom line was: since a lot of people here in Sweden use internet banking, and we all hope it is really secure, then your internet bank account would be one safe way of identifying you. So why not make banks account the basis of a net passport? Rather that than make Microsoft the key to my bank account!

Re:There should be no "single authentication netwo

[Gaijin42]

Ebay now allows authentication via passport. Logging in from a win2k box or winxp box for ebay is automatic.

But why?

[The Bungi]

I just don't get all this. We do not need a centralized personal information system. That much is apparent. Not from Microsoft and not from anybody else.

These companies are doing all this stuff just for the sake of *doing* it, to spite and fight Microsoft. Nothing more.

While I'm not blind to the fact that whoever controls all this information will have a measure of power, it remains to be seen if people actually buy into the whole thing. Microsoft may claim 88 gazillion-trillion Passport subscribers, but how many of those are really one-time half-filled and fake entries used to get a temporary spamming Hotmail account? How many people are actually dumb enough to store their credit card information in a Passport (or whatever)? With all the negetive press e-commerce site hack-ins have received in the past few years I'd be surprised this constitutes any significant percentage of Passport users, even among clueless computer users.

The whole industry is overestimating this supposedly "next killer thing" for the Internet. But, predictively enough, the lemmings have all decided to jump over the cliff together. Well then, let them be squashed together.