Mar 14, 2006

Liberty Adoption Announced

[Lost in my draft bin]

Liberty Alliance announced new adoption information. It's a pretty impressive list and forecast for 2006.

Some Notable numbers in summary:
  • 120 million citizen identities in the global e-government sector including deployments in Austria, France, Finland, Norway, the Middle East, Spain and the United States;
  • 585 million identities and devices in the mobile and telecommunications sector with vendors and carriers around the world implementing Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services for identity-based consumer and enterprise applications;
  • 72 million online service provider users able to leverage Liberty identity specifications for conducting e-commerce and accessing and managing a variety of entertainment and social applications;
  • 20 million Liberty enabled identities in the technology and enterprise sectors with organizations managing B2B, B2E and B2C services based on Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services.
What's more, there are inumberable deployments that are not announced, for various reasons. I think that is a pretty impressive adoption curve, given that ID-FF 1.2 is only a couple of years old.

Congrats to the Liberty folks for:
- make this happen
- finding all this deployment data

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Infrequent Visits

I checked into a hotel last night in Phoenix, Arizona, and was greeted by a rather amusing placard.

On the placard, which provided instructions on how to begin an internet session (non WiFi tho... sheesh), it suggested that if you were having trouble connecting, and to ensure you are not viewing a cached page,

“Go to a public website (not an intranet), such as www.msn.com, that you do not normally visit.”
Is msn.com in that much difficulty, or is this service provider not a fan of Microsoft... perhaps we'll never know.

Mar 13, 2006

Google - Panoptically speaking

Stefan Brands has some interesting material covering panoptical systems (tho imprecisely labels Liberty Specification with this moniker). The system I fear the most, is the inevitable Google Authentication service, which Phil Windley reminded me of with his post on the XMPP underbelly of GTalk.


If ever there was ever an enterprise who had the brainpower, software power, and the marketing where-with-all to aggregate all my online activities, process that, and sell as a service to others, Google is that enterprise.

They've not made any announcements, that I am aware of, but Phil is correct in saying that XMPP is underneath, and thus so is authentication services. trouble is, among other things, it looks a little too Passport-ish for my taste, and so you won't see me using it.

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Mar 7, 2006

Identity Face(s|ts)

I've been working recently on some new attempts at understanding what exactly is the best way to model Identity Attributes, and who should or can state them about a user (Alice from here on out). What I've concluded is that anyone can assert attributes about Alice (truthful or not). Sometimes you can find these assertions, and sometimes you cannot.

There are at least two separate layers for attributes: a horizontal and a vertical. The horizontal layer represents what can be best described as Alice's vCard. This layer represents attributes which share commonality across almost any application domain, be it social or otherwise. Other tidbits like personal preferences, the type of cell phone she carries, her iTunes playlists, and whatnot can also be lumped in here (tho in some cases, slices of these end up also in the second layer. more on that in a bit).

The second 'layer' is comprised of vertical pillars of domain specific attributes. Financial, social, business, Alice's Rock Climbing Club, her neighborhood, etc... these carry both attributes asserted by others, as well as Alice's own attribute statements.

Reputation systems (attributes asserted by others of Alice) tend to focus only in these vertical domains. Reputation systems cannot effectively function as a horizontal layer, as the perspective of Alice varies from domain to domain. But proximate domains may borrow reputation and other attributes from one another, tempered and weighted by their proximity to one another.

So the relevance of Alice's attributes is proportionate to the domains “distance”, and tempered by the asserting parties reputation in both domains.

This introduces the notion of the “over-layer” domain, where arbitrary aggregations of attributes from nearby domains define a third dimension. This domain, rather than being just another vertical domain, is my persona to a given community.

I've been dabbling with a variation to Paul Madsen's Vector Addition for Identifiers, where the vectors are influenced by these sorts of behaviors between and across domains. Hope to have that RSN ;-)

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