I will be giving an OpenID talk at JavaOne this afternoon at 4:00pm in the java.net Community Corner in the Pavilion. In this, I will explain Sun's recent press announcement and shed some light on what we are planning to do next. Slides (and a podcast) will be available soon at the community wiki.

tag: OpenID, identity, sunopenid

Marina Fisher and I will be presenting on AJAX interoperability here at JavaOne on Thursday at 5:30pm in Esplanade 302. We will be covering jMaki, WCF, Silverlight/ASP.NET AJAX and Java REST API interoperability. For more details, go here. 

tag: AJAX, jMaki, Silverlight, Interoperability

In the free VMWare Server edition, there is no vmfstools program that could be used to extend and manage virtual drives, as it would be e.g. needed to extend boot partitions. Instead, the program is called vmware-vdiskmanager and performs - as far as I can tell - the same function.

tag: vmware, diskutilities

Paul has a wonderful letter to Hubert on his blog ... Sorry Paul, 5 CDN will not do - but here is a web site that might help

tag: identity, OpenID, opensource, sunopenid

As a response to Johannes' post (Thanks, Johannes!), here is an unordered list of all folks that have been contributing to OpenID - Thanks to all of you:

• Hubert Le van Gong
• Wajih Ahmed
  
• Yvonne Wilson 
  
• Lauren Wood
• Rich Sharples
• Eve Maler
• Paul Bryan
• Pat Patterson
• Erica Pereiras
• Tim Bray
  
• Carolyne Wong
• Terry Palanca
• Jodie Pastor
  
• Jacki DeCoster

and many, many, more ...

tag: identity, OpenID, opensource, sunopenid

Today, Sun is announcing (Press Release) a new program to explore how OpenID can be used and utilized in a corporate environment.

As a first step, we are creating an IdP exclusively for Sun employees. What is the rationale for this, especially since there is an ever growing number of OpenID IdPs available for anybody to sign up? In principal, there is – obviously – no difference. However, the big difference is that by creating an IdP at sun.com and creating a process and policies around account this IdP, we create a trust base for relying parties: anyone accepting a sun.com OpenID authentication is assured that the holder is a Sun employee. This knowledge can be applied to customize the user experience to the Sun employee (e.g. for a special discount).

This IdP is implemented as an extension to OpenSSO/Sun Access Manager. By putting the OpenID protocol on this proven platform, we can simply extend this reliable and secure platform to new set of clients and relying parties, while offering SAML/Liberty federation and authentication from a single IdP. Today, OpenID is still simply another access protocol for relying parties, but going forward combination of OpenID with the power and capabilities of SAML will enable a variety of interesting applications. The extension is also available for OpenDS.

Over the next couple of months, we will release a number of new services and ideas around OpenID. One of the more interesting areas (I think) will be convergence and interoperability. Stay tuned!

Finally, on a personal note: I really enjoyed working with everybody on this project. Given the little time and resources I think we really got this done right.

tag: identity, OpenID, OpenSSO, opensource

I just picked this up from Phil Windley(he also found the lyrics):

Gee, I haven't laughed like this in a long time

tag: humor, mathematics

As most of you have heard by now, a certain number is the focal point of a major controversy between the a small an mostly insignificant, but loud portion of a minor industry segment on the one side and the majority of people living on this planet on the other. Somewhere in the middle are folks like Wikipedia, Google, and as of yesterday digg.com.

The root cause for all this nonsense is - of course - the DMCA, which states that even parts of a DRM "circumvention device" are illegal.

I find it completely intolerable that such a very small group has the audacity to claim protection rights for a simple sequence of 32 hexadecimal numbers that are on equal basis with the protection rights for intellectual property. This is - by all due respect for *actual* intellectual property - completely ridiculous. In fact, I think that this claim undermines the value of intellectual property per se, since  - if this would hold in a courtroom - literally anything could now be claimed to be protected by the DMCA:

Consider the following situation: I am using the number 20 07 as my secret key to unlock 'protected work'. As such, any reference to this number that is even remotely associated with DRM or content protection is a violation of my DMCA guaranteed right. So, if you, or your company should happen to work in the DRM field, be sure to not write down years in any of your communications. While this example is a little over the top, it still illustrates the extremes that are possible in this legislation.

Another interesting question would be: What happens to a person getting a tattoo of a part of a circumvention device? Can he/she be ordered to get skinned? Or terminated?

tag: FreedomOfSpeech

Funny, I find this number everywhere now ... What could it only mean?

UPDATE: I get it! The numbers in the title are only the lyrics to this song on YouTube. I hope that citing his lyrics here is covered by fair use.

tag: FreedomOfSpeech

Here is a nice short article by Scott Hanselman on what is currently happening in .NET land - especially at MIX07. I find his graphic on the evolution of the various .NET technologies quite interesting and helpful. A couple of interesting take aways and comments:

- Silverlight 1.1 alpha, along with the "CoreCLR" will be interesting to disect. According to Scott, there is nothing "micro or tiny" about this runtime, only sane refactoring. That might be so, but the Base Class Library amounts to somthing of a Micro/Mobile edition ...?!

- The Dynamic Language Runtime is interesting - but I am not quite so optimistic to believe that the Microsoft Permissve License will really win the "hearts and minds" of the hardcore open source community...

- The JavaScript/CLR (in process?) integration sound *really* interesting.

Ultimately, the success of Silverlight and the CoreCLR program will probably depends on platform support. And as Sun has learned very painfully, sufficent platform support can only be achieved with truely open source software.

Talk about procrastination: for the longest (sic!) time, the EU-U.S. negotiatons on the open skies agreement seemed to be the the very definition of procrastination. This is now fortunately over: starting next year, we can hope that the monopoly of the few exalted airlines with trans-atlantic licenses will falter and competition and market forces will reign. About time!

tag: Open Skies, Air Travel, Monopoly

The next two weeks (three weeks really) are going to be interesting: first I will present at JavaOne on AJAX interop, together with Marina Fisher. This JavaOne should get really exciting for a whole number of reasons, especially for the open source identity community ... stay tuned.

After that, Phil is inviting again to IIW 2007 which will certainly be interesting and entertaining. I promise to post frequent updates on what is going on there, as well.

tag: iiw2007, javaone, Identity, Open Source

So, here are my slides from the work shop - unfortunately the breakout session are not being webcast, so I provide the slides here.

In addition, you can find the strategic plan of the ID Theft task force here and the appendices here.

tag: Identity, Identity Theft, FTC

Here is an interesting move by some .NET developers: they are pleading with Microsoft to open up .NET and - at least - support it on multiple platforms, if not outright open source it. Now that would be interesting.

tag: Microsoft, Open Source, .NET

WPF/E (Windows Communication Foundation/Everywhere) is now called "Microsoft Silverlight" and available as a beta here. I think it will be really interesting to see if Microsoft goes beyond Windows and Mac and will start supporting other OSes (like Solaris or Linux) as well... and also *continue* to support this for the future.

Today, AG Gonzales and FTC Chairman Majoras held a press conference, reporting on the progress of the ID Theft task force. The probably most interesting takeaway for me was the fact that the DoJ is creating a dedicated federal ID Theft Law Enforcement Agency. This agency will focus on ID crimes, especially cases of mass ID Theft. Along with this comes legislative initiiatives that will adjust current law to the challenges that those new crimes pose and also require federal agencies to discontinue the use of social security numbers, where possible.
This is really interesting, especially in the context of privacy and government agencies. Take the RealID act for example: in its current form and planned implementation it will aggregate a lot of consumer/citizen data in central repositories. From a privacy perspective this is not exactly ideal, especially when there are no explicit provisions in the law about protecting privacy. With the new ID Theft TF mandates itseems quite reasonable to review the current plans for the RealID implementation.
I have a little video of the press conference that I will post later.

tag: Identity Theft, FTC, Identity

Ok, I gave in. I finally registered my personal i-name. So going forward you can (also) reach me by using =beuchelt. My contact page can (obviously) be accessed by

http://xri.net/=beuchelt

Let's see how this goes....

tag: i-name, XRI, Identity