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A Universal Roaming Profile?
Arnaud Sahuguet asks: "I have a cell-phone with my phone book, a PDA with my calendar info and my address book. I have my home desktop bookmarks, my work desktop bookmarks, my laptop bookmarks, my PDA bookmarks, etc.
They are all mine, but somehow they are not, because they live in
different networks (or on the same network but with different operators).Everybody keeps talking about convergence, but I don't see any
convergence on the user profile front (data that matters to me). Microsoft is pushing for .NET MyServices, Sun et al. are pushing for Liberty Alliance, Apple is pushing for .Mac. Is it the right way to go?" One of the large major issues surrounding such a system would be implementing it in a way where the user can control the flow of data: where it is stored, when a certain piece of data can be sent, and who is allowed to get it. Sounds like a fine idea to me, what do you all think?
Napster is (I should say was) a community of users willing to share MP3 music files, administered by a central server managing meta-data about users and files. I don't know what the exact goal was, but I can see it as a way to free ourselves from the music industry monopoly.
GUPster would be a community of network entities (e.g. servers at Yahoo!, server at SprintPCS, servers at my university, my home machine, etc.) willing to share standardized user profile components, administered conceptually by a central server managing meta-data about entities and components. The goal is to create synergies between network components in order to deploy value added services for the user. (Since I am working for the telecom industry, the goal is to make network operators happy by making end users happier.)
Just like in Napster, my user profile information will be distributed but the meta-data will be centralized (at least from a logical point of view) at the GUPster server. This way, I can decide that my credit card information will be stored at my bank, my calendar information on my Yahoo! account, my game scores on the Sony web site, etc. Network components storing my profile information will have to support the right set of interfaces and protocol and will register to the server the pieces of my profile they are storing.
Note: I will be the one deciding who stores what. Think of it as like moving to a new place. You can choose your electricity, gas, phone, cable and Internet providers.
Applications willing to access any of this information will talk to the GUPster server. And just like Napster, the server will not return data, but referrals (i.e. where this information can be found).
Unlike Napster, the central server will also enforce some access control policies defined by the user (let's call them my 'privacy shield'). If the request for user profile information is not OK (e.g. nobody can access my presence information after 9pm), the returned referral is empty.
Does it sound crazy?"
"As a user:
- would you be willing to have your personal profile information stored on the network?
- who would you trust? Your bank, your ISP, your cell phone provider, your company, the EFF, no one but you?
- what kind of guarantees would you require?
Napster is (I should say was) a community of users willing to share MP3 music files, administered by a central server managing meta-data about users and files. I don't know what the exact goal was, but I can see it as a way to free ourselves from the music industry monopoly.
GUPster would be a community of network entities (e.g. servers at Yahoo!, server at SprintPCS, servers at my university, my home machine, etc.) willing to share standardized user profile components, administered conceptually by a central server managing meta-data about entities and components. The goal is to create synergies between network components in order to deploy value added services for the user. (Since I am working for the telecom industry, the goal is to make network operators happy by making end users happier.)
Just like in Napster, my user profile information will be distributed but the meta-data will be centralized (at least from a logical point of view) at the GUPster server. This way, I can decide that my credit card information will be stored at my bank, my calendar information on my Yahoo! account, my game scores on the Sony web site, etc. Network components storing my profile information will have to support the right set of interfaces and protocol and will register to the server the pieces of my profile they are storing.
Note: I will be the one deciding who stores what. Think of it as like moving to a new place. You can choose your electricity, gas, phone, cable and Internet providers.
Applications willing to access any of this information will talk to the GUPster server. And just like Napster, the server will not return data, but referrals (i.e. where this information can be found).
Unlike Napster, the central server will also enforce some access control policies defined by the user (let's call them my 'privacy shield'). If the request for user profile information is not OK (e.g. nobody can access my presence information after 9pm), the returned referral is empty.
Does it sound crazy?"
The poster illustrates the problem with examples such as bookmarks and address books ( which is a different problem than what liberty et. al tries to solve I believe) . These kinds of information can already be kept in an LDAP server and most applications can store and retrieve these from those servers. Outlook does it, mozilla does, ximian does it.
LDAP address book support is relatively mature in most email readers. Check out OpenLDAP for more info.
Single sign-on can also be done via LDAP. Or Kerberos/LDAP if you're so inclined. Netscape NTSych product, the Psynch® product, etc. can be used to sych NT or win2k with an external database. Check out projects such as pgina. There's a free general purpose NT password sync dll available from AcctSync. This DLL is nice, you can catch user passwords and pass them to an arbituary script with the username. This could be a perl script that updates LDAP to a vbscript that updates the coresponding Oracle user, it doesn't matter.
Also, it's simple to store public certs in an ldap server, making it easier to deploy PKI on a budget ( you don't want to know how much netscape and novell charges for this per user, trust me :)
In short, a lot of your problems can be solved right now by running a LDAP server and configuring your applications to rely on it for their datastore. Good luck.
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