How many times have you seen this cartoon? If you're answer is "about 100 times or so"...yeah....me too. At Net-ID
I saw it again, included in a not-very-exciting sales pitch for an OCSP responder product. What flabbergasted me though was the inclusion of the cartoon's origin (which for copyright purposes I too include below).
1993 this was first published. Lets just think about that for a moment. That dog must be at least a year or two old. I mean who'd trust a puppy with a keyboard? So that means this dog is now getting on for 15 years old. That's a respectable age for a canine. It is however a shocking length of time for us to still not have cracked the problem of accurate and trustworthy user identification on the 'net.
That dog is now finding it difficult to walk, and I didn't want to mention it but it smells a bit sometimes when it curls up in front of the fire. And I do wish it'd stop scratching itself like that when Auntie Kath is over. Meanwhile, the identity management industry continues to waffle. We still type userids and passwords in. We still buy laptops and desktops with no included device to replace userids/passwords. Apple is as guilty here as any W-Intel bundle. None of the 6 or so broadband router/firewalls I've bought in the last 5 years came bundled with such a device either. You might think that buying equipment for broadband connectivity might be a sign that the person was about to exposed to the nastinet (crawling with those pretty viruses). Another nice cross-sell opportunity for a smartcard reader/finger scanner/whatever. Comes to think of it, my bank hasn't offered to sell or give me one either. Identity theft....what is that again?
Get serious about identity management. Or the dog gets it....
Note: The cartoon included in this post is noted to be by Peter Steiner has been reproduced from page 61 of July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20) only for academic discussion, evaluation, research and complies with the copyright law of the United States as defined and stipulated under Title 17 U. S. Code.
The Metro is not exactly known for being a newspaper chock full of serious news. If you don't know it, the Metro is a smallish, colour newspaper given out to London commuters at stations. There's always a few celeb' stories, a half hearted attempt at a serious news story, and then lots of personal ads.
Being free, the carriages tend to be strewn with copies discarded by readers as they reach their station. Lemming like I picked up a copy this morning and my eyes were drawn hypnotically to the "page 3 model". What a set of sweet tendrils on that honey!
Apparently MessageLab, who clearly have been so successful at solving all our security problems they have little else to do, have rendered viruses into art. Messagelab spokesman Paul Wood, whom I can only think must be hoping for a payrise this year and is thus doing whatever he's told, soberly tells us that this is what viruses look like and oh, what nasty blighters they are too. And there I naively thought that viruses and their ilk looked like a hex dump, or a C++ program if you're lucky.
For a moment I thought that this was just another junky piece of Metro coverage. Nope. Checked the MessageLab website and they're so proud of this there is press release dating to Jan' 16th announcing this. So, not just another piece of junky coverage. I'll forgive you Paul if you announce that you're auctioning off these pieces of "art" to raise money for charity.
One of the other big themes at Net-ID is SharePoint and other collaboration spaces. The use of these tools is rapidly rising, since MSFT introduced their initial offerings back in 2003. Of course Lotus Note and Groupware have been offering collaboration environments for a long time. But I think this is a space where MSFT's strength of position in the client and office productivity suite worlds will go a long way toward them evolving the marketplace. Clearly, collaboration spaces amplify existing security challenges especially with regards to content centric security models. We've had the establishment of the host access management market, and the Web Access Management (WAM) market. The next one to watch I think is the Collaboration Access Management (CAM) market. Already about 6 to 8 point solution vendors are offering add-on CAM products of varying levels of sophistication. Expect this to be an area of market consolidation by the large IAM suite players. Oracle especially is a logical mover in this regard. Stay tuned..
I'm in Basel today and tomorrow participating in the Net-ID 2008 conference. The theme of the conference is interoperability of identity management systems and actually tomorrow I am giving a presentation on that exact topic. I'll post the presentation materials up afterwards. It is clear from the software vendors who presented today that standards based interoperability is only being somewhat taken to heart. Proprietary mechanisms are being deliberately implemented in order to build a perception of value for a given vendor's solution stack, and then also lock in buyers into stack. Novell particularly admitted such in response to a question from me after their pitch.
I would note that we seem to be stuck in a quantum singularity and are repeating ourselves.
I would note that we seem to be stuck...oh never mind.
I am hearing excited reports of how identities will be soon inter-operable between public and private sectors and as evidence the on going roll out of a government issued national ID card, or a health benefits card is held up as evidence. I remember that discussion in 2001, 2002, 2003, well you get the picture.
Side note: by lunchtime I'd had about eight or so good solid conversations between sessions with people. Interestingly, unsolicited in came up that three of them have made decisions in the last 12 months or so to not have a car. Or more accurately, to not have a second car. In every case some catalyst has resulted in their family not having a second car anymore (wrecked, change of jobs resulting in loss of car etc). As one guy (from the US) put it "We found that we needed maybe 1.2 cars". All of these people are happily juggling car access right now, and/or are experimenting with non-ownership alternatives. For example one guy who lives in Washington DC has signed up with a service whereby you rent cars by the hour and access them via an issued smart card. really that count of people should four not three, as that situation applies to me as well. So that is 4 out of 9 people. Could we be beginning to see a cultural change in the attitudes to car ownership and transportation options?
How many times have you seen this cartoon? If you're answer is "about 100 times or so"...yeah....me too. At Net-ID
