Real time 0

Posted by dburkes Tuesday, February 19, 2008 06:41:00

Heard on NPR this morning-

"Scientists have developed a new atomic clock which is accurate to within one second every 200 million years. This is in contrast to the current official atomic clock which is only accurate to within one second every 80 million years."

Those people need to get real.

IIW2006b - Day One Wrapup 0

Posted by dburkes Monday, December 04, 2006 20:57:00

Protocol Battle Royale (hold the cheese)

Today I attended Day One of the Internet Identity Workshop, 2006b. Today's half-day agenda consisted of introductory presentations by some of the key players in the space- Microsoft, Eclipse Foundation, Sun/Liberty Alliance, OpenID, etc.

Before I give my opinionated review, let's be clear as to the perspective I'm coming from- I'm a website operator who would like to support open identity standards, so that my users have to trust me less (that lowers their barrier to using the site), and so that I have to code less (that lowers my barrier to providing the site).

I couldn't care less about the technical details of the protocol. In the past, I would have cared a lot about the technical details, but that was before I quaffed the getting real juice. Now, I just want what's easiest for me, and what's most attractive to my users. I have adopted laziness as a key working strategy, and it's working out splendidly so far :-)

So here I am, the skeptical pragmatist, listening to presentations, trying to distill it all into a practical approach to what seem like, at points, competing solutions. On one side I see the SAML/Liberty Alliance gang with their proposals, and on the other side there is the OpenID/Sxip gang with theirs.

And then it really struck me- something looks awfully familiar here. Substitute J2EE for SAML, and Rails for OpenID, and the comparison looks pretty much the same. Whereas Liberty and SAML seem to be trying for a comprehensive approach which can serve almost any situation, OpenID and Sxip are instead opting for the simplest solution that does what users and developers actually want now. And you needn't look too closely to see where my sympathies lie in that type of battle.

OpenID has some outstanding issues, for sure, but things seem like they are really moving forward. For example, from what little I heard about it today, the new Assertion Quality Extension seems like a big step in the right direction.

The momentum seems to be clearly with OpenID now- I'm eager to learn more over the next two days!