Notes on Bill Gates’ Identity Keynote

Many of you know my colleague Mike Jones. He had enough wits about him to take notes on what actually transpired during the keynote earlier today. So I'll share them with you:

The flow of the identity part of the talk went something like this:

  • Slide: Evolution of Identity: Making the Vision Real (with picture of two cards in hands)
  • People are used to choosing what credential to use where for what purpose (talking about cards in our wallets)
  • We use a variety of physical tokens to represent these things
  • CardSpace creates a vehicle to allow people to have a GUI for credentials that represent their identities or personas in particular situations
  • Each thing in the physical world conveys a particular set of information and discloses just enough information
  • CardSpace provides a drag & drop interface for identity
  • People will have to acclimate to it
  • People can create their own credentials and others can give you credentials
  • The system reasons about what the right credential is for you to simplify things for users
  • WS-* hints about what credentials that are being looked for
  • CardSpace shows candidates for credentials

Then they segued to the OpenID collaboration announcement:

  • Issues of reputation and trust are foundational on the Internet
  • Different levels of trust are needed in different contexts, such as blogs and access to enterprise resources
  • People have been thinking about issues of trust
  • OpenID 2.0 is doing this in the blog / Web 2.0 world, others are coming at this from the enterprise space
  • We see these approaches as being complementary
  • “Today we are announcing that we are supporting OpenID 2.0 and that they’re extending what they’ve done to enable the use of strong credentials”
  • They're doing this because they see that it solves problems and attacks that a pure password approach has
  • We're excited about this marriage of CardSpace and Web 2.0
  • This will help eliminate the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks
  • CardSpace is built on our work on the WS-* specifications
  • OpenID will be endorsing the CardSpace marriage later today
  • We see this as a very smooth continuum with a common GUI metaphor

Numerous enthusiastic comments followed in Mikes rendition…

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Kim Cameron

Work on identity.

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