The late Douglas Adams (along with Mark Carwardine) wrote a book titled Last Chance to See about a number of animals on the brink of extinction. The chapter Blind Panic was all about the baiji dolphin's predicament. Practically blind, the baiji dolphin relied sonar to navigate the Yangtze river - the trouble is that the Yangtze is really busy and hence noisy and polluted. The baiji didn't stand a chance, though from the book it seemed that the Chinese did put a lot of effort into trying to save them.
So far nobody has mentioned InfoCard/CardSpace. I think you will find that one of the major pushes for the new extended certificates is to improve the user experience with respect to security. Presently anyone can get an ordinary SSL certificate - a phishing site can easily obtain an existing SSL certificate that will allow them to fool more average joe users that no certificate at all. With an extended certificate a company's name, location and logo are also included as part of the certificate so it should be much easier for uneducated users to make the connection between the certificate and the organization whose site they are visiting and more difficult for the phishing sites to do so. So the new certificates provide a better way for websites to prove their identity to users and aim to provide a consistent way of presenting this information to users so that they can make a choice as to whether or not they trust a site.
CardSpace is a Good Thing. Check out Kim Cameron's blog http://www.identityblog.com/ for ongoing coverage. Microsoft is doing everyone a big favor in the identity space - they fully acknowledge their mistakes of the past (e.g. Passport) and are very open in terms of what they are doing and how they are doing it. Further, the specifications behind all of this are unencumbered (see http://www.identityblog.com/?p=574/.
Googlebar and the GoogleToolbar are produced by different groups of people. I tried Google's version for a while - I like the spell checker, but found that popup windows take about 3 seconds to load when it is running. Switching back to Googlebar the delay is closer to 1 second (way more acceptable and 3).
M$ are repeat offenders too - they got fined for doing this in Australia for the XBox launch.
The trouble is that the fines aren't large enough - they need to be substantially larger than the amount of publicity generated by the hoo har that results from defacing the public property (i.e. they get on the prime time news, etc). The fine should be more like $1M.
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The late Douglas Adams (along with Mark Carwardine) wrote a book titled Last Chance to See about a number of animals on the brink of extinction. The chapter Blind Panic was all about the baiji dolphin's predicament. Practically blind, the baiji dolphin relied sonar to navigate the Yangtze river - the trouble is that the Yangtze is really busy and hence noisy and polluted. The baiji didn't stand a chance, though from the book it seemed that the Chinese did put a lot of effort into trying to save them.
Scott
So far nobody has mentioned InfoCard/CardSpace. I think you will find that one of the major pushes for the new extended certificates is to improve the user experience with respect to security. Presently anyone can get an ordinary SSL certificate - a phishing site can easily obtain an existing SSL certificate that will allow them to fool more average joe users that no certificate at all. With an extended certificate a company's name, location and logo are also included as part of the certificate so it should be much easier for uneducated users to make the connection between the certificate and the organization whose site they are visiting and more difficult for the phishing sites to do so. So the new certificates provide a better way for websites to prove their identity to users and aim to provide a consistent way of presenting this information to users so that they can make a choice as to whether or not they trust a site.
For details see the section titled Improved User Confidence in the Identity of Web Applications in Introducing Windows CardSpace: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnlong/htm l/introinfocard.asp/
CardSpace is a Good Thing. Check out Kim Cameron's blog http://www.identityblog.com/ for ongoing coverage. Microsoft is doing everyone a big favor in the identity space - they fully acknowledge their mistakes of the past (e.g. Passport) and are very open in terms of what they are doing and how they are doing it. Further, the specifications behind all of this are unencumbered (see http://www.identityblog.com/?p=574/.
Googlebar and the GoogleToolbar are produced by different groups of people. I tried Google's version for a while - I like the spell checker, but found that popup windows take about 3 seconds to load when it is running. Switching back to Googlebar the delay is closer to 1 second (way more acceptable and 3).
M$ are repeat offenders too - they got fined for doing this in Australia for the XBox launch.
The trouble is that the fines aren't large enough - they need to be substantially larger than the amount of publicity generated by the hoo har that results from defacing the public property (i.e. they get on the prime time news, etc). The fine should be more like $1M.