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eBay to Drop Passport, .NET Support

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

December 29, 2004, 6:39 PM

Auction site eBay announced to members on its Web site Wednesday afternoon that it will drop support for Microsoft's Passport and .NET Alerts by late January. Users were told that "once this takes place, the Microsoft Passport button that is currently displayed on Sign In pages will be replaced with links to a page with more information."

The announcement came with practically no warning, however in recent months, it had become much more difficult to sign up for alerts through Microsoft's .NET services as the pages to do so were buried on eBay's site.

Users still wishing to receive alerts will have to sign up for eBay's own mobile phone alerts or the eBay Toolbar, which will display .NET-like alerts when the user's auction is about to end, is outbid, or is the winner.

In recent months, eBay has also made its service available to third-party developers through "Certified eBay Solutions."

Microsoft was disappointed with eBay's decision, but vowed to continue to push its .NET framework as a better method for business-to-consumer interaction.

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By felix

posted Dec 31, 2004 - 9:42 AM

i never used eBay's .NET sign-on either other than the outbid alerts which worked well with MSN and faster than email notification. And since a few months ago I can't configure my .NET settings anymore within the eBay notification preferences for some reason. Gives some error message.

Score: 0

By zridling

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 2:19 PM

The few apps I've seen employing .NET are incredibly slow. Heck, they make an Adobe app look fast. Is anyone programming with .NET yet? I know of several authors who even refuse to learn it because of its arbitrary complexities.

Note to Microsoft: You are falling WAY behind.

Score: 0

By Mark Gillespie

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 7:19 PM

.NET as in .NET framework has nothing todo with the .NET passport authentication that ebay uses.

What with this and your other misguided comment, we can only assume you are a total newbie.

.NET is massive in the commercial and finance sectors of development, and a excellent platform. If you had any understanding of the technology, you would realise that once a .NET application has opened, it's many many times quicker than conventional applications.

Score: 0

By yohimbe9

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 6:42 PM

Sorry, you're way off on that one. .Net is used by many people across the globe and has been for many years now. It allows for very fast development using safer tools. While it is true that there might be a 10% overhead (mathematically speaking at least), if you program properly you won't even see it. As for begin an "arbitrarily complex" language, that's far from the truth. If you know any of the C style languages you should be able to jump onboard in 5 minutes using managed C, or maybe 30 minutes to use C#. If you know VB 6 or earlier you can jump right into VB.Net but to play as a first class citizen in the programming world you'll need to spend a couple of hours learning concepts that weren't available in previous versions (mostly true OO stuff). I can't speak for J# at all but I assume that's pretty easy to pick up, too. If there's anything that's complex, its the Windows APIs. Literally tens of thousands or more functions that have always existed in a flat namespace. .Net takes most of these and wraps them into a heiarchy, grouping them by catageory. You've got System.IO for file system functions, System.Data for data functions, System.Drawing for drawing and so on. With proper use of threads (something VB people have to learn) your app will function the same as a regular app, but your app will hopefuly be safer.

Score: 0

By Pipewrench

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 10:07 AM

Passport is the mark of the beast. I hate having a single sign on. All that does is give someone access to everything if they get your password. Passport should only be used for MSN messenger. Too many things are already tied to Passport. I don't need anything else tied to it.

Score: 0

By kgruber

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 12:05 PM

Most sites with the exception of Microsoft gave you a CHOICE whether to use an internal or external authentication (i.e. passport). I cannot think of any vendor website, other than Microsoft that forces you to use passport. Can you name one?

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 3:24 AM

Centralized authentication suffers from many potential problems when it comes to commerce:
1. The vendor must be trusted. Microsoft isn't.
2. The vendor must be secure with a history of focus on security: Microsoft isn't and hasn't.
3. The vendor should share protocols and methods of security: Microsoft doesn't.
4. The vendor should have a focus on the actual product, not have it as a shoot-off to tie into other products.

Ebay and other businesses fear Microsoft as much as they use and respect them. They have to draw the line somewhere to protect their own business.

The massive security breach of a system like this getting compromised is without comprehension. I would never use a passport account for anything money/account related. I suppose it's handy for getting a Demo CD sent from Microsoft, but that's about it.

Score: 0

By kgruber

posted Dec 30, 2004 - 2:00 AM

Monster.com dropped support for it six weeks ago, and now eBay. If you look at Microsoft's passport site, they disabled the ability to view passport enabled sites. The only major vendors I can think of that still use this service are Ubid and Mcafee. However, Microsoft dropping Mcafee in Hotmail for TrendMicro could cost Mcafee's support for passport as well.

I really liked the convenience of having a common authentication scheme across many sites. We keep hearing of Liberty Alliance, but I haven't seen any major sites showcasing it! Bummer.

Score: 0

By spiked

posted Dec 29, 2004 - 9:54 PM

Sure the Passport team was "disappointed with eBay's decision" but the majority of Microsoft product groups and divisions have either ignored Passport or implemented it poorly. Pretty soon the .NET marketing managers will realize that they need to amputate Passport from the .NET brand, which will leave MSN stuck with Passport.

Score: 0

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