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The Liberty Alliance Grows Again
sempf writes "The Liberty Alliance, a Sun-backed open-specification alternative to the Microsoft platform's Passport system, has added two very powerful members, Oracle and Intel. Now over 150 members, one wonders at the future of a world where we have two single sign-on systems. With the three big IM platforms joining forces, is the identity standard of the world going to be Microsoft, or Sun? Is this going to be the next Browser War?"
No. There won't be a war because no one wants it. MSN's passport has been around for a long time now and barely anyone uses it.
It's called Mac OS X's Keychain.
Who cares what company has the new identification standard? I'd rather keep my multiple passwords than rely on one breach of one system to lose my entire online life. I'd assume most geeks are the same and I've met some pretty paranoid non-geeks out there about having any information on the web. So unless we really believe that the information we need to have to exist in our online world won't be available outside of the authentication standards of a few companies, we have nothing to worry about.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
I'll believe there's a "sign-on war" the day Ebay locks people out for not having a passport/liberty alliance account. (Currently they support Passport+their own system.)
Honestly, site-specific sign-on systems are easy to develop and most e-tailers have a powerful motive to offer their customers as many choices as possible. This is stark contrast to the one-or-the-other image a "war" connotes.
Go somewhere random
How universal can any kind of "identity system" be before it gets scary and/or illegal? (Illegal in countries with data protection laws anyway.)
Nokia is on board with this, and as more and more of my personal information gets concentrated on my phone I'll probably end up using it.
Eventually we'll probably all have a digital "passport" of some kind - and much better this way than the Microsoft way - but it's still a bit creepy.
This Like That - fun with words!
With, as you point out, over 150 member companies the Liberty Alliance is scarcely just "Sun".
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
So they're all finally joining forces.
.NET hardware independent toolset will allow MS to move away from x86 at will and set up their own chip division. MS can't grow their software division much more in a saturated market, but if they use their own chipset (or licence it to a couple of 3rd party suppliers) they can take over all of Intel's current profit.
Intel is terrified that Longhorn's
Oracle is of course competing against SQL Server.
All these large IT companies have known for years that MS is going to eat their lunch, but they couldn't work out what to do about it.
The penny has finally dropped - the only way to combat MS is for them all to work together using common standards : hence, their support for Linux, the Liberty Alliance, J2EE and so on.
Liberty is a pretty good standard, it allows federated and distributed authoring instead of Microsoft's "only we know who you are" approach.
It's a shame that everything this alliance has produced up to date is just a pile of PDF specifications. Hope it will change soon.
Be sure that this will be the next big war. But it will most certainly not be fought in the open field. My guess is that this will mostly influence companies as they move more and more to single sign-on solutions.
Article from Internet News
June 30, 2004
Single Sign-On Gains Liberty Support
By Clint Boulton
Although a lack of interoperability has threatened to hold Web services adoption back, Liberty Alliance, a group dedicated to forging an open identity standard, cracked that barrier by certifying nine single sign-in products this week.
The group awarded Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Netegrity, Novell, Oracle, Ping Identity, Sun, and Trustgenix its "Liberty Alliance Interoperable" mark in a conformance test.
The certification, which covers Liberty Alliance Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF) version 1.1 and 1.2 for single sign-on services, involves a rigorous testing process that gauges identity federation, authentication, session management and privacy protection. Vendors must demonstrate interoperability with two other randomly selected participants.
Secure single sign-on services are a key ingredient for Web services, a high-flying concept for distributed computing that allows applications to talk to one another to perform tasks. But customers are afraid to "sign-on" without a secure brand, because crackers can swipe their personal information if the site is not safeguarded properly.
According to a Liberty statement, the products are interoperable out-of-the-box, which pares deployment schedules and saves costs. This is key, as customers are loathe to license technology if it isn't supported by a validated standard, according to Gartner analyst Ray Wagner.
Customers who are thinking about federation projects need some reassurance that there won't be a huge amount of manual integration necessary between partners with different infrastructures," Wagner told internetnews.com. "Requiring compliance with Liberty, SAML, WS-Federation, and WS-I Basic Security Profile, or a subset of the above, will provide some assurance that systems have the capability to work together."
Wagner said he believes most vendors who make identity management products will provide compatibility with specs or standards in the short term, noting that Federation protocols in particular (SAML, Liberty, WS-Federation) will likely converge in the medium term.
With Liberty's certification, companies can say that their products are compliant with the Liberty identity standard, making their identity management software more appealing to customers looking to shore up their Web services platforms with authentication via single sign-on services.
Forrester analyst Randy Heffner said using Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) requires Liberty's ID-FF and offers an interoperable path to Web services as long as users start with Liberty's ID-FF.
"There is a test suite to ensure broad testing coverage of the technical interfaces," Heffner told internetnews.com. "But successful operation of the tests is sort of on the honor system -- except that a vendor who wants the Liberty logo must participate in an interoperability event and successfully connect with a couple of other randomly chosen products."
"This is better than a simple, pre-planned interoperability event, which only proves that there is 'at least one' configuration by which products can work together -- but not that this is the configuration that any given user might need," Heffner concluded.
Web services have been slow to take off over the last few years, due to obstacles such as interoperability, security and manageability. But this is changing, owing in part to the steady work companies have been putting into the matter and the increasing acceptance of the more broad service-oriented architecture approach to software services.
The following products are now Liberty compliant: the Ericsson User S
StarTrek.org Free Webmail
that something is the 'new browser war' is the new black.
...Single sign-on outside the corporate network (aka, the Internet at large) is a problem that doesn't need much solving..
..and both MS and Sun will fail at solving a problem that doesn't really need solving.
A better approach would be for either MS or Sun to develop multi-langauge, multi-platform products that will help web developers implement standard password requirements, username/password schemes, etc.
Forcing a lame implementation of bad technology isn't going to work.
The Liberty Alliance is not a single signon like Passport. It doesn't put all your data in the hands on one organisation. It basically allows you to link logins and share data between them.
It's a tricky concept to grasp but I've found these two introductions helpful:
... IM providers are NOT joining forces ... IM convergence would mean ...
Note that I did NOT say IM convergence. I DID say they are joining forces. They are. Despite all of the vitrol, reality has forced them to hold hands and play nice. I'm sure the ability to send a message from one platform to another using a common P2P platform is not far off, despite your claims.
How exactly is Google making a gMail messenger any different from MSN mesenger, or Yahoo messenger? All great brands, all good technology. Will it be better because you like Google more? Don't get me wrong, I like Google too, but how will a fourth standard make it any better?
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt