The Now Economy

I signed up to do a talk called “Beyond Passwords” at ApacheCon US 2006, which took place in Austin last week. I had originally intended to talk rather blandly about current standards efforts. But in the end I took a much more contrarian approach and examined the promises of Identity 2.0, how policies and implementation progress are likely to affect the real benefits, and the risks or threats. It is a skeptical guide to a potential relying party — a Web service that is considering relying on some 3rd-party to authenticate and identify its users — on how to evaluate the benefits and the costs. (more…)

I am very pleased to announce that an effort I’ve spent nearly three years on is becoming an IETF Proposed Standard. CalDAV will have its own RFC number shortly, and the approval announcement was just last week.

(more…)

As my first The Now Economy post, I thought I’d introduce myself and what I do.

I just joined CommerceNet as a Fellow a couple weeks ago. Just before that I was working at OSAF as a development manager and standards architect. I’d been doing that job for about two years, and simultaneously chairing the IMAPEXT and CALSIFY working groups at the IETF, when I was chosen by the IETF’s Nominations Committee to serve as the Applications Area Director for a two year period. I’m interested in all the work going on in the Applications Area and I enjoy doing standards work which has so much leverage (even though it has a distant success horizon of deployed and useful implementations of new standards), so I was very happy to accept this position and enjoy doing it so far.

(more…)