In his Network World column this morning, Dave Kearns addressed the issue of online “pseudonymity” – the use of artificial or “fake” identities.  He indicated that the use of a fake identity or fake persona online doesn’t automatically make one a criminal.

I acknowledge Dave’s reasoning, but propose that any attempt to use a false identity with the intent to defraud, harm another person or otherwise do mischief is at least unethical, if not criminal.  I loathe the practice of people hiding behind the cloak of online anonymity or pseudonymity to do and say things they apparently do not have courage enough to do or say in the open. 

A long time ago, one of my engineering professors told us, in essence, “Always be proud enough of something you produce that you will gladly put your name on it.”  That is sage advice that bears repeating, even in the online world.

Technorati Tags: Anonymity, Pseudonymity

This morning, my Sun Microsystems colleague Rakesh Radhakrishnan published a blog post that proposed an “Integrated Identity Infrastructure acting as the Common Service Building Block” that provides foundation Identity services for multiple areas in the communications and media markets, including the flowing use case areas:

• Immersive Collaboration Services
  
• Interactive Media Services
  
• Individualized Personal Service
• Innovative Data Services
• Intrinsic Object Services

I am intrigued with this concept of an Integrated Identity Infrastructure enabling a wide ranging set of business and consumer functions.  I look forward to more good discussion in this area.

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity

Today is the official release date of Sun’s OpenSSO Enterprise product, the 8.0 version of the product set formerly known as the “Access Manager/Federation Manager”, which was publicly announced on September 30th.

 

• The Fedlet – a lightweight way for service providers to quickly federate with a SAML 2.0 identity provider
• Multi-Protocol Hub – allows companies that are members of a circle of trust to speak different federation protocols
• Identity Services – invoke AAA services using your IDE of choice or any programming language (e.g. Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, etc.)
• Express Builds – deploy next-generation features from the OpenSSO community with the same support and indemnification provided with commercial releases
• Ease of Use – new task-based UI for common federation-related operations
• Ease of Install – just drop the WAR file into your servlet-container of choice, hit it with a browser and, in the simplest case, supply admin passwords
• Much more, including: centralized server configuration (no more AMConfig.properties text file), centralized agent configuration (no more AMAgent.properties text files).

Give it a whirl – download it here today!

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, OpenSSO

This morning, my colleague Hubert Le Van Gong drew my attention to the Liberty Alliance group on LinkedIn. It is great to see an expanding number of Identity Management groups available on LinkedIn.  I currently belong to these LinkedIn groups which are focused on Identity Management or Information Security topics:

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Information Security

Last night I got an email from Martin Gee, CTO of IC Synergy, pointing out some intriguing blog posts he had written about Access Request functionality his company has created to augment Sun Identity Management software.

I will post comments Martin’s post on these subjects soon, but I would first like to share a comment Martin made in a post he drafted back in August, entitled “What good is Open Source without Support?“

After describing how one of the talented IC Synergy engineers was able to fix a thorny problem because he had access to Open Source code, Martin opined,

“Open Source changes the escalation process. If you have folks that are talented enough to navigate the product code base, interpret the functionally and recompile the code, you have a tactical advantage. Typically you’d work the forums and support process for a couple of weeks with mixed results. Now, in most situations you can by pass layers of support and shorten the patch process. Win / Win in my book.”

“Tactical advantage” makes business sense. For IC Synergy at least, Open Source isn’t just nice to have. It makes a real difference to their business.

Technorati Tags: IC Synergy, Open Source

In a recent conversation with Pat Patterson, Sun’s dynamic OpenSSO community advocate, he referenced a recent blog post highlighting how six of the top twenty contributors to the OpenSSO project came from individuals outside of Sun.  These external contributions, such as those associated with the The Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB), illustrate how fundamental innovation is accelerated by the Open Source model.  It is great to see members of the growing OpenSSO community really working to deliver value to each other.

Technorati Tags: OpenSSO, Open Source

Yesterday, September 30, 2008, Sun Microsystems officially unveiled OpenSSO Enterprise, Sun’s “Next-Generation Access Management, Federation and Secure Web Services Solution.”

Over three years ago, way back on July 13, 2005, just two months after I wrote my first post on this blog, Sun announced at the Burton Group Catalyst Conference “plans to open source its web site authentication and web single sign-on (SSO) technologies through the Open Source Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project.”  I gave the announcement only one sentence of coverage: “Open SSO will provide source code for basic identity services including Authentication, Single-domain SSO, and Web and J2EE agents.”

Yesterday’s announcement was, in a way, a celebration of that early foray into the world of open source.  What began as a virtual toe-dip led to complete immersion in open source waters.  OpenSSO Enterprise is a result of putting Sun putting its entire access and federation management code base into the open source domain, providing a transparent and progressive forum for collaborative development.  The innovations apparent in this newly released product owe much to the many external contributors to the OpenSSO project.

It is exciting to see the fruits of Sun’s open source strategy unfold.

Technorati Tags: OpenSSO, Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity

It has been intriguing for me to read over the past several months about the accelerating demand for digital media distribution and download.  In a crazy world where an YouTube video of yours truly going down a zip line Park City has been viewed over 2,750 times, it seems that online viewers have an insatiable appetite for content.  Yet videos of zip lines are but a drop in the proverbial ocean of digital media.  Just imagine when we really kick it in gear and demand that the industry provide both the ability to stream high defintion video to any device of our choice at any time we want, as well supporting our desire to generate and distribute high definition content ourselves.

This week, in an article entitled, “Deloitte Launches Initiative to Streamline Digital Media Distribution,” David Rips, lead architect of the Deloitte Digital Media Framework and director in Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Media and Entertainment practice, addressed the net effect of this appetite:

“… the technical scale and complexity required to deliver this demand far outstrips the capabilities and capacity of today’s digital media companies and infrastructure.”

The Deloitte Digital Media Framework proposes to establish a new digital media value chain that will enable the delivery of content from multiple creators, on multiple devices, through multiple carriers.

“The technology infrastructure needed to meet increasingly sophisticated media demands will dwarf anything we’ve seen before,”said Phil Asmundson, Deloitte LLP vice chairman and national managing partner of Technology, Media and Telecommunications.

It will be really interesting to see how this unfolds.

In the mean time, take another look at my zip line video. It had twice as many views today as it had the last time I checked. It will be interesting to see if the number doubles again.

Technorati Tags: Digital Media, Deloitte

Washington Technology reported this week “BearingPoint to assist Marines with identity management“. I confirmed today that BearingPoint is using the Sun Identity Management suite as the basis for this significant project. Congratulations to our friends from BearingPoint on this significant win!

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, BearingPoint

Much has been said about user-centric, or user-controlled Identity allowing individuals to choose which subset of personal Identity attributes use in facilitating online interactions. Maybe this could be called “self personalization” because an individual is in control and actively choosing specific steps to follow.

But at the recent Digital Identity World conference, I had a minor epiphany. As a speaker addressed the subject of role management, it struck me that much of enterprise Identity management is also about personalization – granting people the specific rights and credentials to enable them to do their work. These assignments could be made automatically or with human intervention. This could well be termed “assigned personalization.”

I supposed that efforts like Amazon’s to deliver purchase recommendations based on past activities would be a form of “calculated personalization.”

In all three cases, the objective is similar – how can the online application experience be more closely aligned with who a person is and what the are doing at a particular time?

Personally (pun intended), I think this personalization stuff is fascinating.  Those are happy thoughts.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity