WRITTEN ON May 24th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized
Our new correspondent Robin Wilton emails me a Sun policy document Positioning federated identity for the UK government.
Sun’s Scott McNealy was the man with the balls to tell UK e-envoy Andrew Pinder in no uncertain terms what a bad idea MS Hailstorm was. Pinder retorted that McNealy was simply jealous of Gates. Ok, so it was one of those “more heat than light” occasions, but it left me feeling that Sun understands a thing or two about openness as well as taking an early conceptual lead on privacy and standards.
The paper recommends federated identity architecture for an e-enabled UK, and describes Sun’s work with DoD and the UK NE regional smartcard consortium. The French e-admin agency ADAE says an open-consortium route that supports cross-border privacy laws makes this approach absolutely suited to e-government.
Check it out. All the source material is on the Sun UK identity web site.
And let’s ask Robin what he made of the LSE Identity Project.
2 Responses to “On federated identity for UK government…”
Well, since you ask… and stepping neatly past AlanM’s vituperations about Sun, Liberty and Scott,
my impression of the LSE Identity Project is that (for an interim report) it goes a long way towards offering a good risk assessment of the ID Card proposal. I added it to my list of sources of misgivings about the proposal. The list of sources setting out how the ID Card proposal will be a success is… well, not very long, as far as I can see.
And Alan – I’m sure if you want to see real customer implementations of Liberty (whether by Sun or anyone else), that could be arranged. I agree, though, while the software (and some hardware to run it on) are necessary, they are far from sufficient. But who ever claimed otherwise?
oh good lord! mcnealy didn’t have the balls to tell anyone about the hailstorm problem. at the time, he was too busy shovelling sun hardware out the factory doors to all the dotcom upstarts who were handing him fistfulls of money – his words, not mine. the first time i met him he was busy spinning a line about microsoft being “after our children” with the xbox; it’s true, he hates any idea that’s not his own. hailstorm was a bad idea at the beginning and a lot of people told microsoft that. liberty is probably just as bad. how long has that been vapourware now? sun will doubtless talk about shipping servers that are enabled but, so what? it’s not a hardware problem or a software one for that matter.