Interesting comment about the future for syndicated data from an eWeek interview of Tim Bray — who’s just joined Sun to help in a number of areas:
I also think that RSS is going to have a huge application in simple things like watching my bank account and credit card statements—things that are updated irregularly but you want to know when they are, but are not person-to-person individual messages. The spectrum where RSS is a winner is bigger than people suspect at the moment.
From out of left field comes a federated identity scheme called TypeKey. Developed by SixApart, TypeKey is designed to reduce weblog comment spam, an increasingly difficult problem. Most interesting is SixApart’s comments on other uses of TypeKey:
We’ll be providing documentation on how to integrate TypeKey authentication into your own applications shortly after the service launches. At that point, there will also be information about what is required to make use of TypeKey services in commercial applications.
FYI, this weblog runs on SixApart’s TypePad service.
The latest in Doug Kaye’s excellent IT Conversations series is a conversation with Dan Geer on information security. Audio and full transcript are available from Doug’s site.
Wall St. Journal technology editor Walt Mossberg is appropriately incensed in this morning’s column about Microsoft’s handling (if you can call it that) of security issues in its Windows platforms.
He points out that way too frequently the techies blame consumer users for being part of the problem by giving us lectures about what we should and, more typically, shouldn’t do on our PCs.
Instead of lectures, consumers need Microsoft to build into Windows an effective, free, constantly updated security service requiring little or no user intervention. This service would fend off all kinds of threats and invasions of privacy, including viruses and spyware, without getting all tangled up in academic distinctions. …
Microsoft has made untold billions from the court-certified monopoly it holds in operating systems, and its poor security designs have contributed hugely to the problem. Plus, the company fought for, and won, the right to keep adding new functions to Windows, in the slap-on-the-wrist antitrust settlement it was granted by the Bush administration. So, it owes its customers a solution to the security mess.
Court-certified monopoly — I guess it’s come to that?!
Meanwhile, over on TheStreet.com, columnist Paul Kedrosky writes about why eBay is a near perfect acquisition for Microsoft — indeed how it’s the one that’s required if Microsoft it going to maintain any semblance of being a growth stock.
Microsoft owning PayPal (and eBay, of course) — now wouldn’t that be interesting!
P.S. – I highly recommend Maggie Maher’s book Bull! — it’s all about the incredible bull market of the late 90’s. She does a great job profiling the cast of characters as they dance on the stage leading up to the 2000 crash.
Phil Windley posts some notes based upon his participation in a recent Ping Identity Advisory Board Meeting. He makes a great point about the implications that the use of external systems such as SalesForce.com might have on HR practices within the enterprise.
Later, he says:
Networks eventually eat hub-and-spoke systems because of cost. This is what played out in the financial services market decades ago. Large regional banks were essentially hubs in a regional hub-and-spoke financial system. When large financial networks (‘ala Visa and Mastercard) came into being, they quickly put regional financial systems out of business based on cost. There was no reason to have the regional systems in-between the merchant and the network. All it did was add cost, without adding value. So too identity federation?
Not sure he’s got this right. Successful networks are hub and spoke systems that leverage the power and reach of all of the participants in the network to gain advantage.
Visa and MasterCard didn’t put regional financial systems out of business — rather they evolved to be the networks that allowed thousands of financial institutions, both large and small, to participate on shared platforms delivering consistent services to the institutions’ customers, both merchants and consumers.
Fundamental to their success was common agreement on what the basic product was — while also enabling proprietary innovation on top of that basic product to flourish.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s a shared governance model to the financial networks that underpins their basic structure, value, and reason for being — something I just don’t see happening among the identity wannabes and their targets.
At Harvard’s Berkman Center, Joshua Gordon writes about the proliferation of illegal Internet networks in many developing countries around the world. With state sponsored DNS spoofing games in various other countries, can we be far away from state sponsored mass phishing attacks?
Some good new presentations are now posted at the Cryptography Research website.
Brian Cantoni posts his notes from Tuesday’s SDForum Web Services SIG discussion on syndicated data.
Doug Kaye reports on his day yesterday at the RSA Conference and, in particular, Dan Geer’s session.
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