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