BCNet Liberty

Yes­ter­day I gave a talk at the (for­tu­nately) loc­al BCNET/Netera Con­ver­ging Minds Con­fer­ence. BCNet builds net­works for the BC research and edu­ca­tion com­munity, and the con­fer­ence was aimed at the admin­is­trat­ors, deans, and IT man­agers who need to know what tools their research­ers and stu­dents would find use­ful. The con­fer­ence agenda had talks on lots of sub­jects rel­ev­ant to that audi­ence, ran­ging from high per­form­ance com­put­ing, net­work­ing, and secur­ity and iden­tity man­age­ment to advanced media and collaboration.

My talk was about Liberty spe­cific­a­tions, of course. Since I was slot­ted for a 1.5 hour talk, I asked Alex Acton from the Sun Van­couver office to help out. I presen­ted the slides, Alex drove the demos, we got lots of great ques­tions, went 15 minutes over­time and still only got through 29 of the 41 slides. It was prob­ably more use­ful to the audi­ence that way, of course! I like hav­ing a small enough audi­ence that more free-form talk­ing and listen­ing ses­sions are viable. Here are the slides (in PDF format) for pos­ter­ity, includ­ing those I did­n’t get a chance to present.

I had lots of help on cre­at­ing these from Eve, I used demos from Pat and Hubert (Hubert also cre­ated good slides for the recent Liberty web­cast that I could reuse), Scott Can­tor sent me slide decks on Shib­boleth to crib inform­a­tion from, and most of the deploy­ment inform­a­tion comes from Yvonne Wilson’s excel­lent talk at XML 2005. I also used some inform­a­tion from the Liberty tech­no­logy tutori­al. Thanks, everyone!

More Coffee

Not that I’m actu­ally addicted (in fact at the moment I’m not drink­ing much cof­fee at all, the occa­sion­al latte is about it for now), but I came across anoth­er cof­fee-related link for Van­couver. This one proves just what sort of cof­fee-lov­ing area I live in — accord­ing to Delo­c­at­or there are 69 “non-cor­por­ate” (their defin­i­tion) places to get cof­fee with­in 3 km of where I live, and 19 Star­bucks loc­a­tions. Some of the places are lis­ted more than once, but oth­ers aren’t lis­ted at all, so it’s prob­ably a reas­on­able estimate. 

Delo­c­at­or itself is an inter­est­ing web­site and inter­est­ing idea; worth pok­ing around the site a little. Delo­c­at­or link spot­ted at Met­rob­log­ging Van­couver.

User-Centric Liberty

The cur­rent buzzword of user-cent­ric iden­tity led some of us at one of the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ings to dis­cuss actu­ally writ­ing down and show­ing how Liberty spe­cific­a­tions could be used to imple­ment user-cent­ric iden­tity sys­tems. One of the out­comes of that dis­cus­sion was a white paper entitled Per­son­al Iden­tity, edited by John Kemp of Nokia (who, incid­ent­ally is also a co-author of the book Mobile Web Ser­vices : Archi­tec­ture and Imple­ment­a­tion), with lots of input from Paul Mad­sen and Car­o­lina Canales Valen­zuela. The oth­er was a demo that Hubert wrote (I did the CSS, so I con­trib­uted some­thing con­crete to the effort along with mor­al sup­port). Hubert wrote up the demo on his blog, at Liberty � la InfoCard (PDF ver­sion of the demo) and A much nicer exper­i­ence… (which has the flash ver­sion of the demo). Now there’s going to be a Liberty Alli­ance web­cast fea­tur­ing both John and Hubert talk­ing about these issues and show­ing the demo. So if you have ques­tions, this would be a good place to find some answers.

Title: User Cent­ric Iden­tity: Suc­cess Today

April 12, 2006 at 8–9 am Pacific Day­light Time

Presenters: John Kemp, Nokia, and Hubert LeVan­Gong, Sun Microsystems

Abstract:

“User-cent­ric iden­tity” has been the latest descrip­tion-de-jour float­ing around in the media, usu­ally used to describe “up and com­ing” new tech­nic­al offer­ings from a vari­ety of entit­ies. But why wait for future unknowns when it’s already hap­pen­ing here and now with Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions that have found­a­tion­al ele­ments of user con­sent and pri­vacy? In fact, not only are these spe­cific­a­tions avail­able today, there are products built on them that are also com­mer­cially avail­able today.

Regis­tra­tion is required and lim­ited to the first 100 respond­ents. The present­a­tion will be avail­able in archive form after the event. To register fol­low the steps lis­ted below. This web­cast will be done via Webex. Please con­tact Tri­cia Dehart with any ques­tions, tricia@projectliberty.org.

  1. Go to http://projectliberty.webex.com
  2. Under the head­ing Attend a Meet­ing, click Register
  3. Search for User Cent­ric
  4. Select User Cent­ric Iden­tity: Suc­cess Today and click on the Register button.
  5. Fill out the required inform­a­tion and click Register Now at the bot­tom of the page.

Identity White Paper

One of the many pro­jects I’ve been involved in recently at Sun is a white paper that I con­trib­uted to, on the sub­ject of Iden­tity Man­age­ment for Con­verged Net­works. It’s a good intro­duc­tion to iden­tity man­age­ment, with a focus on Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions and the terms they use. There is a cer­tain amount of product stuff (this is, after all, a white paper pro­duced by vendors ;-)) but it’s restric­ted to the appro­pri­ate sec­tions. OK, I’m biased, but if you’re inter­ested in iden­tity man­age­ment and want to under­stand the ter­min­o­logy and some of the use cases and the basic archi­tec­ture, this is a good paper to start with.

Conditions

“When are you going to post about your Con­di­tion” Tim keeps ask­ing (we agreed I could post about it first). The word “Con­di­tion” has under­tones of Vic­tori­an Eng­lish euphem­isms to me, even without the adject­ives “del­ic­ate” or “inter­est­ing”. But I digress…

Our daugh­ter is due in June, although say­ing “due” some­how neg­lects the fact that she reminds me sev­er­al times a day that she’s already present. And act­ive. The now-obvi­ous bump (pre­vi­ously winter sweat­ers and jack­ets did dis­guise it, but not for the last few weeks) is lop­sided, depend­ing on which side she’s push­ing. Waves of move­ment travel across the bump, par­tic­u­larly after I’ve had cof­fee or chocol­ate; our son finds this all fascinating.

In the FAQ cat­egory: We will not be pub­lish­ing belly shots; the web does not need pic­tures of me to add to the large num­ber of preg­nant womens’ bumps that are already on dis­play. I’ll take some time off start­ing prob­ably in May for mater­nity leave, and Tim will be trav­el­ling a lot less than usu­al around that time. Pre­cise details will depend on the baby, my health, and all those oth­er unknown factors. 

And no, we haven’t decided on the name yet. We still have time for that.