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Liberty Alliance Completes Phase 2
g0_p writes "According to CNET the Liberty Alliance project released its phase 2 specifications for the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework. This will provide the much talked about 'single-sign-on' to multiple websites capability. Websites will be able to securely share information about the user including credit card data. The biggest benefit of sharing this kind of data is for people using web services through handhelds and mobile phones (Lesser buttons to click to buy birthday gift..). This may be significant, since many of the new phone models have web browsing capability and there is a considerable surge in sales. Now that this phase is complete we should start seeing this standard being implemented out there on the web. It would also be interesting to see how it stands up against Microsoft Passport in terms of security which has had troubles in the past."
No initiative is going to work unless someone gets a major credit card company on-board to assume the risk, pure and simple.
Frankly, I don't want "single-sign-on", and I don't get why other people would either. The information I'd want to be available to my bank is completely different from what I'd want to be available to "Jim's Hardware Shack".
Presumably, in order for this to work effectively, if you have one standardized set of information about "you", it would have to be the superset of information you'd need for all the sites you use. And, to be efficient from an implementation standpoint, I'd expect this information will be replicated all over the place in various caching mechanisms. This leaves your information fully available to web site operators reputable, disreputable, secure and hackable alike. As well as likely creating a situation where if your primary "record" is compromised, it could provide enough information to allow access "as you" to *all* the web sites you use. This seems like quite a high price to pay for the need to create a separate login for each site, which realistically, is probably on the order of a dozen or two registered sites a year for most users.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If Passport doesn't convert to the "Liberty Identity Web Services Framework", I fail to see how this can get wide consumer usage. Remember, people just want to buy stuff online, they don't want to learn about the differences between passport and a services framework. Somehow they're either going to have to persuade MS to use the framework, or make a superior client that's easy to download (maybe make it an ActiveX control?) Of course, the problem is, Passport ships with Windows/IE, so it's going to be more quickly available that any other client.
If you are worried about this then stop clicking "Yes" to the "Do you want mozilla to remember this information" box. Or turn the feature off altogether.
Don't make Mozilla out to be wrong just because you don't know how to read dialogs.
If I would see a car lot called "Honest Al's Used Cars", I'd hold on to my wallet. Honest people don't usually point out their own honesty.
And when bunch of big companies try to figure out easy and effective ways to share information about me, and call it "the liberty alliance", I doubt that liberty is uppermost in their minds.
As everyone has pointed out, no one wants this stuff, and we'd all be better off if it just went away.
When i think of ultimate security of my personal information it doesn't include giving it to some service to remember it for me because i am too lazy to pull out my wallet and type in some numbers. Heck, if i'm going that far I should just get a remote control for my computer so i can hit the amazon.com button on it and then hit the big red BUY! button. Anyway.. back to my point.. I dont trust that people that i don't know will take care of personal information better then i can.