John Panzer of AOL included a link to an interesting presentation about User Centric Identity on his blog. I only wish I could have heard what he said for each slide.

Thanks to Eric Norlin for pointing this out.

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AOL

In his insightful article today, Eric Norlin states, “the big conundrum facing the Internet’s largest players is how to deal with the silos of identity … All of Google’s efforts are aimed at aggregating more and more bits of people’s identity. Same goes for eBay, Yahoo, MySpace, etc — their value lies in the protected silo of personal identity.”

Each of the big dogs on the Internet are building “walled gardens,” where Identities are portable within each virtual garden, but incompatible with Identities in other gardens. Sounds more like a collection of prickly cactus gardens in Arizona than a friendly set of Gardens of Eden.

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I have begun to receive email invitations to attend hospitality suites at next week’s Burton Group Catalyst Conference in San Francisco. A sure sign the conference is on it’s way!

Last year, I declared Bridgestream’s Random Shakesperean Insults the best vendor giveaway I received. I wonder who will receive the prize this year!

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The recently reported case of mistaken Identity — where Whitney lingered in a coma after a traffic accident in which her friend Laura died, but the authorities mixed up their identities — is one of the most bizarre, disturbing stories I’ve read in a long time.

It must have been heart-wrenching for both families to learn of the mixup – in different ways. After going through the trauma of burying their daughter and agonizing her loss, the Cerak family must have been elated to learn that their daughter was really alive. The VanRyn family must have been devastated to learn, after five months of patient hope, that their daughter had died in the crash.

Ironically, while searching for an online version of this story, I came across a four year old story that was remarkably similar, but didn’t last as long:

“For three days after the accident, authorities thought the boy fighting for his life in a Louisville hospital bed was Jeremy, 15, and the teen-ager killed in the crash was John, 16.

“But moments after a funeral on Saturday for the boy identified as John, the truth came out. John Grubs was still alive. Jeremy was the teen in the casket.”

I can understand how these mixups could occur without adequate scientific testing. Many years ago, I visited a friend in the hospital ICU a short time after he was involved in a head-on collision. His face was badly lacerated and his head was swollen like a balloon. I wouldn’t have known he was Reggie unless I had been told. I’m sure that those who attended to Laura and Whitney and John and Jeremy also were fooled by what they could see. Sometimes we just can’t depend on purely visual inspection.

By the way, the Detroit Free Press reports that the coroner responsible for the misidentification is stepping down from his post. His life was also devastated by the experience. My heart goes out to all involved.

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Mistaken Identity

I just took a few minutes to establish a personal Identity at Verisign’s beta Personal Identity Provider (PIP) service. After establishing my basic Identity and creating a couple of trust profiles, I was able to successfully log in to LiveJournal, LifeWiki.net, Zooomr and OpenID using my OpenID credentials, which were verified by the PIP service.

This Verisign blog entry describes the service in more detail.

Now that I have OpenID credentials, does anyone have a longer list of websites that employ OpenID authentication?

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Paul Krill of InfoWorld reports that “Symantec is considering developing a service that would position the company as a third-party broker of identity management services for the Internet.”

The emergence of commercial Identity providers is essential to the adoption of user-centric Identity technology. It is interesting to see the types of companies that are emerging as potential Identity providers.

Paul’s article quotes Mark Bregman, senior vice president and chief evangelist at Symantec, addressing the business model of an Identity provider, “Rather than charging consumers for the identity management service, the clearinghouse would likely function similar to credit card services, in which merchants pay for the service.”

This illustrates the reality that both technical and business issues must be resolved for Identity providers to work.

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Phil Becker of Digital ID World explores the transition from of thinking of Identity as a hierarchical concept to realizing that Identity within an Enterprise is far from hierarchical.

“In the early 1990’s …the concept that identity was hierarchical was built into its core [network directory]. As long as the scale was relatively small, and what was being managed could be crammed into a single domain, this appeared to work well.”

“… problems arose because enterprise organization isn’t actually hierarchical. And it gets less so with every move towards outsourcing, contract labor, and business partnerships – the very moves toward networking business itself that are creating business advantage today.”

“Thankfully today new technology such as virtual directories, far more flexible meta-directories, and identity federation have arisen and matured so that enterprise identity can now be designed with these hierarchical directories restricted to reasonable domains. Those directories can then become nodes within a networked identity infrastructure that allows abstraction away from the strict hierarchical nature of the directory.”

Phil goes on to point out that correctly modeling Identity as a multi-dimensional concept will result in lower cost, more effective implementations — results that all enterprises would enjoy.

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“Random” thefts of laptops with Identity data seem almost epidemic. CNNMoney.com reports that “names and credit card numbers of 243,000 Hotels.com customers were on a laptop stolen from an Ernst & Young employee.”

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Ryan Nairane reports in a eWeek article entitled Microsoft Passport Morphs into Windows Live ID: “InfoCard will not replace Passport, but rather InfoCard will supplement Passport…You will be able to link an InfoCard to your Passport and use it to access Microsoft, MSN and Windows Live services,” claims Trevin Chow, program manager in Microsoft’s Windows Live Identity Services team.

With all those names, it (or they) should be able to protect us all from all that is evil.

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A long list of interesting articles about various aspects of Identity Management.

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eWeek