Re: Identity in the Browser Workshop Report finish, chartering has begun

On 2011-09-03 03:30, Dirk Pranke wrote:
> Er, whoops, I meant to send the previous message in reply to Harry's
> message, not this one.
> 
> As far as this one goes ...
> 
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:56 PM, Anders Rundgren
> <anders.rundgren@telia.com> wrote:
>> You can view this topic from many angles but one thing is fore sure:
>> Standardization of browser identity solutions will not follow the
>> path of traditional standardization.   There are many reasons for that
>> including:
>>
>> - There are very few vendors (implementations)
>> - The scope is huge; from the social web to the enterprise
>> - Most of the affected parties do not participate in open forums
>> - Microsoft is generally absent since their browser isn't open source
>> - The development pace has increased dramatically
>>
> 
> I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing how standardizing stuff in this area is
> any different from any of the other spaces where we talk about changes
> to browsers? But perhaps that depends on what the scope you have in
> mind is?

Yes, if you (for example) include they payment solutions that Google and
other vendors undoubtedly working with right now the scope gets pretty big.

The kind of stuff that I have worked with since 2007 has (AFAIK) never
been dealt with by an SDO; it has been divided into small pieces run by
completely disparate organizations with the net result that essentially
nothing runs out-of-the-box.  Some of the technologies involved have to
date only been developed by closed industry groups primarily pushing a
"business model" rather than a vision creating something generally useful.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/pkix/current/msg29682.html

That's my scope FWIW.  It involves Open Hardware which is sort of an
antithesis to the NDAs and licensing fees that the previously mentioned
industry groups have to offer :-)

I have been told that this is an impossible project.
I think it has a much better chance succeeding than (for example)
Microsoft's (once upon a time quite hyped) Information Card technology.
In fact, the plan is to relaunch Information Cards by creating a more
generally useful client platform for credentials.   So far all efforts
in this space has targeted a single authentication technology although
probably 90% of the issues should be applicable over the board.  This
includes payment stuff as well since the separation between payment and
identification technologies (IMO) is mainly of historical interest.

Anders
Stepping down from the soap-box

Received on Saturday, 3 September 2011 07:17:01 UTC