- From: Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 06 May 2014 06:26:18 +0200
- To: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, public-webid@w3.org
On 2014-05-06 00:51, Kingsley Idehen wrote: > On 5/5/14 12:09 PM, Anders Rundgren wrote: >> Around 2005 Microsoft announced its pretty cool Information Card concept with >> the hope that for example banks would adopt it. >> >> I told Microsoft folks early on that banks in the EU have already put their >> money on X.509 certificates but unfortunately they can't use the solution >> featured in Windows and IE. If you fix that, they may indeed jump on the >> Information Card bandwagon. >> >> Microsoft did neither listen to me nor checked with the banks what the problem >> could possibly be. >> >> Six years later they were forced withdrawing the entire Information Card concept >> from the market due to lack of adoption. It goes without saying that they haven't >> considered making X.509 client authentication useful for bank-users even in the most >> recent incarnations of Windows; they have rather opted for U2F like the competition. >> >> What I wanted to say with this is that "denial" is a human and natural reaction, >> but if the condition stays forever, it becomes a problem. >> >> In the WebID-TLS case the "defection" to U2F by all platform vendors except Apple >> and Mozilla indicates that it's time to "Kill Your Darlings" and move on. >> >> Anders > Anders, > > Once you delve a litter deeper into RDF based Linked Data prowess, you > will be more hopeful. > > I don't share your pessimism, and I've used every piece of technology to > which you've made reference thus far. Yes, the WebID group is like Microsoft stuck in an ever-lasting "denial" state. Fortunately, the world at large has moved on. Personally, I believe that the primary designer of U2F, Google, prematurely dismissed traditional X.509 client certificates as a useless and privacy-impeding technology. Could this maybe have something to do with HTML5's <keygen> as well? To my knowledge no mobile bank is using this piece of junk which is the current enrollment solution in Android. iOS doesn't support <keygen> although Apple was very keen that it became a W3C standard :-) As I see it, the X.509 client-side-cert journey have just begun! The predecessors disappeared somewhere along the road and no search-party were ever sent out... That's optimism :-) Anders >
Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2014 04:26:49 UTC