Re: Federation protocols

On 1 June 2013 23:16, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:

> Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm totally for using X.509 certificates for this and have been arguing
>> several years for their adoption.  The bigcos are blocking it so far due to
>> UX.  We were unable to get status.net <http://status.net> to support it
>> even though we had people ready to work on the code.  By all means do try
>> and get X.509 deployed, I'll write code for it, and support your messaging,
>> but expect pushback due to the X.509 user experience.
>>
>>
>>  X.509 is in extremely widespread use (can you say U.S. Federal
> Government), it's built into browsers and mail clients, there are modules
> to support it for Apache and other major web browsers, and there's
> infrastructure for generating and managing certificates.
>
> The problem is not with the technology, or its implementation.  The
> problem is that key players don't want to adopt ANY open
> identity/authentication mechanism.  Creating yet another technology or
> protocol won't change that.
>

The key players tend to push the trusted third party paradigm and that is
understandable as it is a business model.  But it's not the only way, so
long as there is choice, then the end user has a chance to choose their
paradigm.


>
> --
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
>
>
>