Let me clarify what Nvidia is actually patenting, as the Slashdot headline and blurb are misleading.
Nvidia acknowledges that they didn't invent Gaming Servers. The patent reads:
In recent years multiplayer, online video games have become popular...See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,841,980, entitled "Distributed System for Communication Networks in Multiuser Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,823,879, entitled "Network Gaming System"; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,838,909, entitled "Reducing Latency When Synchronizing Access to a Multiuser Database over a Network.
Nvidia sees the following problem in prior art multiplayer gaming servers:
A problem arises in that the players often have differing skill levels and game attribute preferences. For example, one player may want to play "Quake" only against other players having a skill level at least equal to his or her own skill level.
So, their invention is an Interactive gaming server that basically "..runs at least one game having multiple levels of play and playable by a plurality of users simultaneously." (visit the site for more detail).
I still think the patent is utter crap, but it's certainly not as bad as the Slashdot headline made it out to be.
LDAP by itself doesn't provide complete auth
on
User Account Management?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Typically what people do when using LDAP for something like this is to use LDAP for authentication (which is easy/trivial to do).
The hard part is management of authorization information. Authentication simply tells you that a particular set of credentials provided by a client matched the same credentials in your LDAP server (which is what happens in any authentication system). You assume that since these credentials should only be able to be provided by a particular person, then the application is "authenticated" as that user.
Authorization means what can that user do now that they have authenticated.
You could authorize access based on group membership, where the user's entry lies in the DIT, time of day, gender, an attribute in their entry or a number of different routes.
So to be honest what you probably want to do is to use an existing authentication service such as Kerberos (which already provides a standardized means of providing authorization services) and use a directory service to feed the user & application data to Kerberos.
Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia acknowledges that they didn't invent Gaming Servers. The patent reads:
Nvidia sees the following problem in prior art multiplayer gaming servers:
So, their invention is an Interactive gaming server that basically "..runs at least one game having multiple levels of play and playable by a plurality of users simultaneously." (visit the site for more detail).
I still think the patent is utter crap, but it's certainly not as bad as the Slashdot headline made it out to be.
(a professional speaks on the issue)
Typically what people do when using LDAP for something like this
is to use LDAP for authentication (which is easy/trivial to do).
The hard part is management of authorization information.
Authentication simply tells you that a particular set of credentials
provided by a client matched the same credentials in your LDAP
server (which is what happens in any authentication system). You
assume that since these credentials should only be able to be
provided by a particular person, then the application is
"authenticated" as that user.
Authorization means what can that user do now that they have
authenticated.
You could authorize access based on group membership, where
the user's entry lies in the DIT, time of day, gender, an attribute in
their entry or a number of different routes.
So to be honest what you probably want to do is to use an existing
authentication service such as Kerberos (which already provides a
standardized means of providing authorization services) and use a
directory service to feed the user & application data to Kerberos.