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October 10, 2002
FWIW
For what its worth: according to my GPS, the Hyatt Regency Tech Center is a N 39 degrees, 37.820' W 104 degrees 53.896' and its elevation is 5692 Ft. And with that, I'm off to the airport.
05:12 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Conference Extracurriculars
Digital ID World is on my list of favorite conferences this year. I think Phil, Andre and Crew did a great job of putting together a forum that is entertaining, informative, and most importantly, a great place to meet and talk. I spent the afternoon looking in on the vendor exhibit hall and talking to people. Here's some of what I saw and heard:
- I talked to Andre Durand (of Jabber fame) about PingID. PingID has aspirations of being the Visa of the identity world. Someone needs to do it. He also envisions services (such as risk scoring) that I think are analogous to the kinds of things FirstData Corp. does in the financial services world.
- I talked to John Maffei from Microsoft about Passport. I've avoided signing up for passport myself (even going so far as to refuse to activate the eBook reader on my iPAQ because it required a Passport account). Still, as I've blogged before, Passport, AOL screenname, and the like represent real ways for utah.gov to connect to some citizens.
- I stole a t-shirt and packet from ePresence. Still not sure what they do. :-)
- I saw a great demo of an enterprise level IM tool from Communicator, Inc. As I've blogged before, I think IM could be an important tool in the enterprise---I use AOL IM at work all the time---but I would like to see a secure solution that connects to the Utah Master Directory.
- I talked to Brian Armstrong of OneName about their product. Still can't say I really get it---lives somewhere above authorization services---but its based on XNS which sounds like something I need to spend some time on.
- I got a tech-talk from the Netegrity folks about SiteMinder and how it works. We use it at the state and I now feel like I'm in a better position to make decisions about how and where we use it.
- Alex Tosheff from St. Paul Venture Capital is a guy I met at lunch. Great guy---I got some good ideas on home based computing infrastructure from him. He introduced me to Jothy Rosenberg of GeoTrust. Jothy and I hit it off on several levels. First, his company offers a way to sign things with digital signatures without the user ever having to know about the digital signatures. Reminds me a little of NxLight, a Utah company. He showed me a demo of their tool which uses personal information gleaned from drivers records and credit records to ask the user questions as a way of establishing identity so that they can issue a one-time use digital signature. Pretty cool. On another level, he's also a former Computer Science professor turned business person. We talked a lot about academics, how business experience could inform our future roles as academicians, and how theory is important for CS students.
The best part of the conference is often the stuff that happens outside the conference hall and this was no exception. The Digital ID World folks did a good job on the more social part of the conference and seemed to recognize this as an important feature. I'm grateful for a fulfilling experience.
04:30 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Digital Right Management
David Weinberger is moderating a panel on digital rights management.
Denise Howell spoke about the legal aspects of digital rights management. She made the point that DRM moves the payment to a per-use rather than a per-copy basis and this changes in fundamental ways, the relationship we have with content providers.
Bala Vishwanath talked about how newspaper companies tried to discourage people reading someone else's newspaper and failed but succeeded, as a business, by adding coupons, etc. to the paper.
Brad Brunell is the director of trusted platform technologies at Microsoft. He's the guy whose name I didn't get yesterday at lunch. He takes abuse well. Probably a job requirement given what he does and who he works for. Dave is beating him up a little right now. The question: why now (for DRM)?
Ken Kingenstein works for Internet2. Ken makes the point that analog rights management doesn't translate well into the digital world. He asks how do we enable appropriate access and use instead of how we control access or protect copyrights.
Dave makes the point that DRM takes away much of the wiggle room that people have traditionally had with respect to copyright law and makes things rigid. Brad pointed out that we content providers would have the make a policy that allows that. I think that this conversation ties in with the quote from Dan Geer I posted yesterday:
If the access control matrix eventually scales out of reach. What then? I submit that where the geometric scaling of access control will kill it in the end, accountability stands ready. This is not to say that I like pervasive, universal accountability, per se, but the only reason a free society works is that you can pretty much do anything though if you screw up badly we will find you and make you pay. Accountability is like that, i.e., it is a log processing problem.
To date we have used accountability and this shifts the problem to one of access control lists. That's a seismic change and may not be possible (per Geer). This will force content providers to default to "lock down" and we'll lose the wiggle room we've traditionally enjoyed.
Ken makes the point that we've enjoyed 4000 years of anonymous reading and he'd hate to see us lose that. I agree.
12:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Privacy and Customers
Martha Rogers (1to1.com) is talking on privacy and customers. I'm really enjoying the talk. Here are some thoughts from her:
There are no successful companies without customers, so companies need to:
- get more customers
- keep more customers
- grow them into bigger custormers
Viewing the customer base as an asset, the customer base is the single best measure of the value of the company itself.
Random acts of kindness by customer-fiendly personnel are not the same as customer centricity
If I'm a successful company I need to know something about you that my competitors don't know and use that to do things for you that my competitors can't do. Going to a competitor requires reinventing the relationship.
Focusing on relationship equity will refocus the company on people. So, is privacy about compliance or is it about relationships with customers?
Companies must:
- Identify customers, individually and adressably.
- Differentiate them, by value and needs.
- Interact with them more effectively and efficiently
ITS is in the throes of becoming a customer centric organization. In the next few weeks they will release a roadmap of how they intend to get there over the next few years. The issues raised by Martha are just as applicable to an internal service fund as they are for companies. Further, they are applicable to any service organization, even those that are appropriated.
11:10 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Craig Mundie on Identity
I'm listening to Craig Mundie, CTO for Microsoft, deliver the keynote for today. He is one of the first speakers here (outside the government session) to talk to the fact that governments will be players in this space and what challenges that presents. He brings up the problem of trans-jurisdictional and trans-national identities and mentions that many of these problems have traditionally been solved by legislation (in the case of jurisdictions) or treaties (in the case of sovereign nations. As I've said over and over---this is a real issue that cannot be ignored. Government has a way of making sure its not ignored. We need our legislatures and Congress making these decisions with our help instead of a vacuum.
Craig talked about the benefits of good identity infrastructure and services that accrue from removing blocking issues for efficient information flows:
- inter-agency and inter-government exchange of appropriate policing information against terrorism
- greater health care efficiency with adequate safeguards for privacy
- secure extra nets between companies
- eGovernment services such as passport renewal
- digital rights management of corporate and personal documents
I think most people would not necessarily agree that the last one is a benefit. Its certainly a benefit for Hollywood, but how does it help me? Going back to my theme of government, intellectual property rights are not the same as individual rights or even property rights. In fact, IP is only granted to the extent such granting benefits society as a whole (read the Constitution).
10:30 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Dinner
I had dinner last night with AKM Adam and Jon Udell. I'd never met either of these gentlemen before, although I felt like I knew Jon well both from his writings from Byte and, more recently, his weblog. It was great to finally meet hi in person and have an opportunity to talk. Adam is a Episcopalian minister and professor of divinity at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. In some ways that link guided some of our conversation about how a detachable identity (i.e. one that is virtual) changes what a person thinks about themselves.
An interesting thought occurred to me as we talked: most people who are talking about digital identity care very little about actually attaching that identity to "meat." They really don't care about the person, just the attributes associated with that identity (like its bank balance). That is not true for many things that governments care about. In fact, if you think about it, we have an entire branch of government that is devoted to establishing links between identity and a physical body: the courts. Trials are largely about proving that a particular physical body has a particular identity (that of the person who committed the crime).