Arbiter:

• a person empowered to decide matters at issue; judge; umpire
• a person who has the sole or absolute power of judging or determining.

When I read the recent Computerworld article, “Facebook: The new arbiter of enterprise identity” this morning. I didn’t quite know what Arbiter meant, so I looked it up.

Robert Mitchell commenced his article by stating:

Today Facebook knows your identity. Tomorrow Facebook may very well be your identity. Before long, enterprise identity and access management may key off of social media identities rather than remaining an island unto itself. Are you prepared? That’s the message that Gartner analyst Earl Perkins passed on to attendees at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo conference last month.

I know I’m not ready, and highly doubt my employer is ready to cede “absolute power of judging or determining” to Facebook or any other independent entity.  We have a long way to go before any corporation in its right mind would trust Facebook or any other popular social media site to authoritatively vouch for the identities of their employees.

I agree with Jackson Shaw’s observation in his comment to the article:

… until there is some sort of formalized identity verification done around Facebook it will be difficult for an enterprise to simply accept a Facebook credential. Is that Facebook user really me? Also, what about stronger password policies (length of password, change period, complexity, use of strong two-factor authentication) and better security generally for Facebook? There needs to be more enterprise security built into Facebook before it can ever be used by an enterprise.

So, let’s wait and see.  I think it will be a long time before Facebook or any other identity provider supplants the core identity management infrastructure of major enterprises.  Complement, certainly.  Replace?  It will take a while.

I read a chilling article in the Wall Street Journal this evening, entitled, “U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens.”

Yep … that means you and me – data about us law abiding citizens will now be analyzed by government officials, all without judicial warrant or probable cause.

Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime. …

The rules now allow the little-known National Counterterrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. …

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior.

It was way back in my high school days when I read and was terrified by the prospects of George Orwell‘s novel Nineteen Eighty Four.  Orwell might have predicted the wrong year, but what once seemed like far-fetched political satire seems disturbingly like accurate prophesy.

Forty years ago today, on December 11, 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission, took what must have been an exhilarating drive in the moon rover.   Talk about four-wheeling excitement!

Today’s NASA “Image of the Day” celebrated that significant event with this photo and the accompanying explanation:

Forty years ago today on Dec. 11, 1972, astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, commander, makes a short checkout of the lunar rover during the early part of the first Apollo 17 extravehicular activity at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. This view of the “stripped down” rover is prior to loading up. Equipment later loaded onto the rover included the ground-controlled television assembly, the lunar communications relay unit, hi-gain antenna, low-gain antenna, aft tool pallet, lunar tools and scientific gear.

This photograph was taken by scientist-astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, lunar module pilot. The mountain in the right background is the east end of South Massif. While astronauts Cernan and Schmitt descended in the Lunar Module “Challenger” to explore the moon, astronaut Ronald E. Evans, command module pilot, remained with the Command and Service Modules “America” in lunar orbit.

The big question:  Will we ever return?

I enjoyed reading Ian Yip’s blog post this morning: “Identity is the Foundation.” The heart of the message:

We need to be stating the fact that Identity is foundational to the enterprise. i.e. Identity is the foundation. (emphasis addeed)

As far as identity is concerned, we need to think about it a little differently than we have in the past. Identity is less about the “who we are” and more about “what we are”. We care a lot more about what normal usage patterns look like, what someone is currently doing and what else they could potentially do. In other words, identity today is so much more than it used to mean in the past. It is really about reputation, relationships, context, activity, behaviour and being able to take fast, appropriate action in reaction to things that happen.

I think the concept that identity is a dynamic and immediate is solidly in step with modern business reality.

CNN published an intriguing article today, “Seven ways mobile phones have changed lives in Africa,” which addresses the transformative effect of mobile telephony on the continent of Africa.  And it is only beginning:

“Google, for its part, plans to sell 200 million of its Android phones in Africa and it is estimated that by 2016 there will be a billion mobile phones on the continent.”

Electronic communications has a huge potential to lift and bless the lives of people not only in Africa, but throughout the world.

I attended a very thought-provoking Kuppinger Cole webinar last week, entitled, “SAML is Dead.  Long Live SAML,” featuring Craig Burton of Kuppinger Cole and Pam Dingle of Ping Identity.  It is now available as an on demand webcast.  My favorite slide addressed the sheer scale of what we are expecting to see in just a few years.

We are all familiar with big, complex operations now:

• Large enterprise Identity repositories:  hundreds of thousands
• Large mobile telephony user repositories: low hundreds of millions
• Large social media sites: high hundreds of millions

Adding addressable devices and the API’s to support those devices is mind boggling.

• Devices by 2015:  almost 3 billion
• API’s to support all those devices: almost 27 billion

Meeting that demand will take some real innovative technology and processes.  The webcast was certainly worth an hour of my time.  I highly recommend it to you.

A friend of mine posted the following photos on Facebook today – showing how an “Oil Pull” tractor would have powered a threshing machine about 80 years ago.  Although our technology is much “higher” now than then, we must never forget that we stand on the broad shoulders of those who innovated before us.

The following graphic is a great example of how false conclusions can be easily drawn from perfectly good data.  This is a graph provided by our electrical utility for our family home covering the month of August this year.  It looks like we had a super-efficient month of August for electrical usage, correct?

Well, if you had known the context, the report wouldn’t have looked so good.  During the month of August this year, our home was being restored from a house fire.  No air conditioners were running in the house during the entire month.  No wonder we had a low power bill!  If only we would compare so favorably now the new air conditioning units have been turned back on!

Great article and infographic on the SmartPlanet blog about use of smartphones and other technology in agriculture.

Telecommunications has come a long way from when I grew up in rural Idaho.  Our telephone line had a seven-minute limit on call length because of relative lack of capacity.  And even that was a step up from the party line we had when I was a little boy.