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

You'd have to figure he'd be there...

[scoove]

I found this part of the release rather interesting:

Libery Alliance conference attendants noted an unusual episode at the conference where Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison showed up midway with a crew of Oracle employees chanting "Oracle today makes Osama go away!"

Later, Ellison offered his company's support and participation in the alliance efforts.

"Oracle would be proud to donate our leading Oracle database software to the alliance project," said Ellison. "To us, it's a matter of killing too birds with a single stone. With the power of Oracle 9i, Liberty's registration information would also serve as a national citizen ID database, protecting all of us from the evils of terrorism."

White House spokespersons had no comment on Oracle's previous offer of its database for a national registration system.


*scoove*

This will fail like MS passport.

[Krapangor]

They are building standard for centralized identification.
At the first sight this might be not like MS passport, but the key point is the same: all your data is stored with one company for identification.
But is this the right direction altogether ?
Wouldn't it much better but create distributed authentification systems. These systems could provide decent (and working) anonymisation, because some parts wouldn't have enough information to compromise your anonymity.
They would be more reliable due to being to centralized and they could be really used even for local identification.
Would it be clever and useful to retrive always data from microsoft just for local print jobs etc.
Yes, of course, you don't need today passport/derivatives for local identification, and yes in can be done in the old way. But all passport like systems won't even have the possibility to handle such things.
They are not scaleable to fine grained levels.
Only big stuff, credit card alike.

And so they'll fail because I think someone will create and distribute approach which is better and only the wind of the desert will howl at the ruins of passport and liberty.
(And when noone does it, I'll do it and all written in assembler which won't work just to punish you lazy goats.)