RSSMicrosoft Changes Tune on Liberty Alliance
By David Worthington | Published December 5, 2001, 10:45 PM
UPDATED Another key player has signed onto the Sun-led Liberty Alliance that is intent to forge a unified identity and authentication service for the Internet in lieu of Microsoft's Passport. American Express has joined the long list of allies that rallied to Sun's banner including leading airlines, financial, and security companies.
The announcement comes just days after Microsoft's bitter rival, America Online, consummated its partnership with Sun and gave its full backing to the project despite having developed its own Passport alternative, formerly code-named Magic Carpet.
Initially, Microsoft turned a blind eye to the alliance, shrugging off Sun's attempt to unseat Passport and throw a monkey wench in the company's plans to establish a standard Web services platform. After all, according to a company spokesperson, Passport has 200 million accounts that generate roughly 3.5 billion authentications each month, as well as a tightly integrated role in Windows XP. Microsoft's feelings toward liberty alliance culminated in a speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer given at the Gartner Group Symposium October 10th.
Ballmer was quoted as saying, "I think the Sun thing has absolutely zero probability of mattering to the world. And that's my non-emotional view of the topic." He also contradicted Sun's claim that the software giant was invited to participate in the alliance's mission to drive standards. According to Ballmer, nothing tangible would come out of Sun's efforts.
When asked if his comments were too harsh in retrospect, Ballmer simply told BetaNews, "No."
Since that time, Microsoft has toned down the rhetoric and has perhaps taken into consideration the fact that some of its largest customers reside within the group. With the addition of American Express and today's late addition of Nokia, Redmond has added incentive to re-evaluate its stance. Amex's Blue is a smartcard, with an integrated chip programmed in the Java language.
A Microsoft spokesperson told BetaNews, "We are watching the alliance -- if it turns into a real, industry effort based on some good technology that will not stall the industry, then it may be useful. If it continues to be an anti-Microsoft coalition led by Sun, then it will not be very interesting -- so we will take a wait and see approach."
The spokesperson went on to say, "It's important to note that Passport and the Liberty Alliance are not mutually exclusive, Microsoft is interested in single sign-on based on open Internet standards (Kerberos), and we agree and have said for some time that one company should not be in control. We support federated authentication in a very deep way, and are moving forward today - any industry effort must not leave the 200 million customers out in the cold."
It is unclear whether or not AOL will return to the drawing boards and abandon its Magic Carpet solution for Java-based technology, or just simply alter it to agree with the group's standards. An AOL Time Warner spokesperson was not available for comment. As first reported by BetaNews, Magic Carpet was developed by AOL to counter Passport.
A representative of Sun Microsystems told BetaNews, "Sun Microsystems is extremely pleased with the recent announcements from AOL/Time Warner and American Express expressing their commitment to the Liberty Alliance Project."
"It is Sun's perspective that the addition of these two industry leaders sets the foundation for the delivery of a truly open, ubiquitous standard for network identity, authentication and authorization across a multitude of systems touched by the Internet -from cellular phones and web browsers, to automobiles and a myriad of devices and business systems."
As specifications emerge, Sun plans to Liberty-enable its entire line of products.
If Microsoft want's it's standard to go through, it will. Every company in the world can sign on to the other one, but it won't do any good. All they have to do is make it not work with windows. And under the guise of security of the .net platform they can do it. You can have a standard, but what good is it if the guy that's writting the operating system everyone uses, doesn't like it and will specifically write the OS so it doesn't work?
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|Sure, MS CAN do this, and the gov. also could have competly abliterated the USSR during the Cold War (and just about everything else on the planet, for that matter), but it doesn't mean they will.... and has MS ever really done this, aside from the DR-DOS issue, which may or may not have been on purpose.
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|I wonder if Sun's legendary Standardization policies will actually "kill" this. Correct me if I am wrong, but Sun *still* hasn't submitted all the standardization and stuff for Java yet, right? I am not sure how that is going, as they have submitted, taken back, resubmitted, taken back again, etc etc. Unless I have the story wrong on that. Fewt?
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|Honestly, I dunno..
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|Well, anyone else know if Sun ever got things finalized with the standardization panel with Java? It *has* been a few years...if they have not, I don't really see Sun doing much with this either.
Blame Microsoft all you want for pushing for their own standards, but at least (compaired to Sun, anyway) they are getting standards done.
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|Sun has refused to go through any standards body or process. Java will remain a proprietary language solely owned and controlled by SUN
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|Sun do go through a process when it comes to the evolution of Java, namely the Java Community Process (http://www.jcp.org), they simply refuse to open up the language as the originally promised.
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|Wonder why the FSF didn't jump on their cases about that..
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|I don't get this, eBay is already using Passport. So they're gonna use 2 authentications?
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|They already use two. You can use your eBay account or your Passport account. Nothing wrong with making their system compatible with all three.
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|What a planet we live on, Terrorists, War mongers and Bill Gates with his MS Machine. There passport is good it must be said, Sun play games wirth AOL in to try and outgun MS on the PR front and all to no avail tks to Big Bills Media Machine at MS
The lesson here today children is this: " how many home users are going to bother there arse d/loading Sun`s Passport soultion when Windows already comes with MS Passport peep shoW"
Consider this over the next few seconds:)
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|Simple...if you want to use products from companies such as Nokia then you will have to!
Sites such as betanews should support Liberty to prevent one company controlling and taxing net usage.
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|Its people and ideas like this that impede human progress. Microsoft's Passport works well and is already established, so why don't we just throw that out and go with something that noone will ever bother getting since Passport is built into Windows.
Don't these dummies have anything better to do like develop new technologies instead of just being bitter that Microsoft 0wnz their asses
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|I got my first taste of passport the other day when I bought Money 2002, it reminded me of why I left Win32 in the first place :-( I want all of the features I paid for without having to register with Microsoft servers!!!
GRRRRRRR
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|You don't HAVE to register, yet
that yet is the scary part. I think we should all be scared if the day when M$ does make a completely subscription-centric OS comes, but that's a long way off if at all
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|So don't subscribe. It's not like you are being held at gunpoint here :)
But in all seriousness, for the majority of people universal logins and subscriptions are a *good* thing. Sure, call Microsoft and big corporations evil all you want, but 200 million people are currently using Passport and enjoy being able to do so. The convenience will always outweigh any worries about global domination, unfortunately.
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|I like passoprt, because it's not required to use any product (execpt MSN messenger) it's free and it give's me more features I can do more with just 1 account, but I don't like microsoft using stuff like Windows product activation. it's required for me to use windows past 30 days, it nags me until I do use it. sorta sounds like shareware huh? MS shouldn't have that sort of power. and I'm not going to spend my money on it until they remove it. I think people take both of these and mix them together passport is differant and people shouldn't be afraid for passport.
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|Yes you do, or half of money's features don't work. Unfortunately it doesn't say that on the box! :-(
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|It's required to get all of the features that you pay for when you purchase Money 2002..
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|OK, in a sense (Communist) Microsoft shouldn't have the power to do what it is doing/has done
BUT, in our position (Capitalism) they should have every right to do so, you agree to the EULA when you install it, and before you open the CD case.
You just can't win :/
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|What are the features that it requires Passport for? I haven't used Money since the 2000 version (gave up on balancing my checkbook). I know that it integrates with MSN Money which right there is a clue that it uses Passport.
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|Check the newsgroups right now. Do a search for - "Money 2002" Passport -
You will find that Passport has not been authenticating Money 2002 users for several days. I have been using Microsoft Money for 5 years. It was a great program until they integrated Passport. Money will not update stock quotes unless it is signed in to Passport. Money will not do background banking unless it is signed into Passport.
When I try to go to support.microsoft.com, I get an "error enountered. Please go to support.microsoft.com"
The moral of the story is: don't put all of your eggs in Microsoft's basket.
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|It requires passport for Offline Banking (WTF? It'll monitor my bank account while I don't have money open!?) AND to communicate with my bank. (AGAIN, WTF?) Why can't I communicate with my bank directly? There are a few other things it uses passport for, my wife was the one working with it so I can only give a half informed comment.
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|That sucks. There are a few money manager projects on sourceforge but nothing out of Alpha. You could always go with Quicken but that is over-featured (nice way of saying bloated) as Money. I personally use Excel to do my finances.
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|We used to use gnumeric, but it got out of hand. I wanted to try something new.
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|Are you on crack!?!?!? Even if M$ could be trusted to behave well, and even if they had no huge security problems with their products, we should still welcome competition, as it will lower the costs and improve the quality.
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|Are you on crack!?!?!? Even if M$ could be trusted to behave well, and even if they had no huge security problems with their products, we should still welcome competition, as it will lower the costs and improve the quality.
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|can you actually give me a reason why microsoft cant be trusted? dont give me that WPA crap as it cant be decoded, what else? IE6 has loads pf privacy options, all the feedback to MS can be disabled pretty easily in WinXP, WindowsUpdate doesnt send any data to microsoft it just generates a webpage from an ActiveX engine. i cant find anything to suggest Microsoft are not trust worthy. I like passport, it is fast simple and secure. all they have done that pisses people off is that they put there own programs in there own OS. if you ran a software company you would want people to use your programs, Microsoft just want people to use there software, if you dont want to use IE dont just install Netscape or Opera. I dont see Ford getting in trouble for making a monopoly as they put Ford Brand Radios in there cars or Palm for putting there own browser in the OS! if you dont like WPA dont use WinXP, i dont understand why you moan so much about it as you love linux so much use that! if you dont like passport use this new SUN thing when (if ever) it is out, lets see how secure (and add free!) something partnered with AOL is :P
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|correction you need to ACTIVATE to make the functions work NOT register!
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|Oh I dunno, try reading online media over the last year. Maybe due to the fact that Microsoft employees LIED UNDER OATH. STFU, and BTFU idiot.
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|Why is ur brain dead view of the world so PC centric? Have you looked at the companies on liberty alliance: nokia, ebay, aol, Amex are all not interested in your PC. You can do
read the article before you reply to it.
"Since that time, Microsoft has toned down the rhetoric and has perhaps taken into consideration the fact that some of its largest customers reside within the group. With the addition of American Express and today's late addition of Nokia, Redmond has added incentive to re-evaluate its stance. Amex's Blue is a smartcard, with an integrated chip programmed in the Java language."
any questions?????
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|you might also want to check this out
http://www.projectliberty.org/chartermembers.html
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|Isn't gnumeric just a spreadsheet app like Excel?
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|Actually, Fewt, they just didn't lie AS GOOD as Netscape, AOL, etc...heheheheeheeeee
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|ROTFLMFAO!
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|Yep. I wanted to get away from the whole spreadsheet concept. :-)
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|All my stocks are being updated.
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|Microsoft is notorious for security. Or lack thereof. Everyone knows that Microsoft OS's are riddled with bugs, Microsoft server's run with more holes than swiss cheese, and both require more maintenance than a 88 corolla (which was my car a few years back :(
Anyway, I'm surprised nobody mentioned this article about how Passport was vulnerable, but thankfully the hole was discovered by an Apache founder and brought to MS's attention secretly to prevent hackers from ordering stuff with your identity.
http://www.wired.com/new...gy/0,1282,48105,00.html
This was about a month ago. I'm sure Passport will become more secure as time goes on, but remember: when trusting a resource that is Microsoft-based, a hacker has at least three points of entry: Operating System, IIS, and related to IIS, any CGI and ASP bugs.
Maybe your little PC behind that Linksys firewall router with ZoneAlarm protects you quite nicely, but for people that need to expose their computer to the network, be it FTP, HTTP, etc., there's a lot of liability using a strictly MS based solution.
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|Microsoft is notorious for security. Or lack thereof. Everyone knows that Microsoft OS's are riddled with bugs, Microsoft server's run with more holes than swiss cheese, and both require more maintenance than a 88 corolla (which was my car a few years back :(
Anyway, I'm surprised nobody mentioned this article about how Passport was vulnerable, but thankfully the hole was discovered by an Apache founder and brought to MS's attention secretly to prevent hackers from ordering stuff with your identity.
http://www.wired.com/new...gy/0,1282,48105,00.html
This was about a month ago. I'm sure Passport will become more secure as time goes on, but remember: when trusting a resource that is Microsoft-based, a hacker has at least three points of entry: Operating System, IIS, and related to IIS, any CGI and ASP bugs.
Maybe your little PC behind that Linksys firewall router with ZoneAlarm protects you quite nicely, but for people that need to expose their computer to the network, be it FTP, HTTP, etc., there's a lot of liability using a strictly MS based solution.
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|You've got a nice view. Do you think Windows would exist if Microsoft had thought the same way. Hey, Apple (or PARC, whatever...) has put a GUI into their OS so we can't do it. No, they probably thought: "we can do this better". Wether they did I don't know but Apple isn't the only one with a GUI based OS.
One nice sentence was about "Microsoft believing that one company should not be in control". Well I guess if they keep saying that loud enough, they and maybe some other people will start to believe that.
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|well, personally I think MS are just bullies and rubbish anyhting which impninges or potentially inpinches on the monopolistic ideals. Sun in all due respects is no better, why pay a war game with the mad mullahs at MS?
Who gives a Monkeys Chuff about Passports, Tradeports whatever. Encryption is built into Windows IE (Which incidentlly cannot be removed from XP) so why toss around with other forms of virtual ID cards...
Beats me
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|Well Swiss Cheese my ass. Microsft even states in is OEM licence that Windows is not even guaranteed to work. So, I agree Windows is insecure. Its Trash but well, we are all stuck with this s*** until some other item comes along. Apple take note!:)
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|Ok, I've no read two of your posts, and I've come to the conclusion that you are certifiably insane.
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|I hate to tell you this, but all pieces of software (aside from hello wolrd type apps) have bugs and all have security issues.
I also hate to tell you this, but Windows itself is very secure, AND IIS is generally secure if you take the time to configure it, rather than running just the default settings.
But I guess you are just an idiot MS basher who doesn't really know what they are talking about.
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|Nice one nate
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|liar
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|Windows itself *can be made* very secure, IIS *can be made* semi wanna be secure.
:-P
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|Got it.
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|no im not
you only need to use passport if you need to use something that requires membership to some sort of service. Microsoft have intergrated these features into passport so users dont have to signup for ANOTHER service for example username@money2002.com or something stupid like that. you can use Money 2002 without needing to use Passport but it will be limited.
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|Isn't that exactly what I said? You need to REGISTER, not ACTIVATE.
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|BIND *can be made* secure, sendmail *can be made* secure, wuftp *can be made* secure, etc etc etc etc etc
Everything *can* be made more secure, but it's just not possible to test for absolutely everything in any semi-complex application, i.e. 'hello world' doesn't count.
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|agreed. I wasn't trying to say otherwise. ;-) BIND and WU give unix a bad name, just as IIS, and IE give Windows a bad name (exploit wise)
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|I dont see IIS and IE giving Windows a bad name. How many people use windows w/o IE and/or IIS? IIS has/had security issues, as does other web software. It's web software, it hold personal (sometimes) information and IIS tends to be quite easy to learn which accounts for some of the reason it's so popular in the business world. For computer hackers it would seem reasonable to learn exploits of IIS due to it's high usage and large profile. Just heightens the chance of gaining information.
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|"IIS has/had security issues, as does other web software"
Really? What other web software has as many exploits as IIS? Apache hasn't had an exploit in two years. IIS gives MS a bad name, even MS has admitted that there are serious problems with the IIS code base, and only a complete rewrite will address those issues (can't find the link). Since it's bundled with all versions of NT from 4.0 to 5.1 it makes Windows look bad. Lemme give you a *few* examples:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdn.../0,4586,2814546,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdn.../0,5859,2813854,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdn.../0,4586,2799069,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdn.../0,4586,2825716,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdn.../0,4586,5080419,00.html
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