Doug Kaye hits the nail right on the head. Again:

"Liberty 1.0 doesn't cut it. It won't enhance consumer privacy. Single sign-on isn't worth the initial extra initial steps a consumer will be asked to take, and the benefits don't outweigh the risks to privacy and security.

I can see why it's attractive to some vendors, particularly those who want to create brand-driven partnerships in lieu of open price competition. But I expect we'll hear more from consumer's rights groups on this very topic." [RDS through Scott Loftesness]

His opinion on the vendors' role in the stanard promotion is in line with my last months' thinking on usfuleness of web services and federated identity. In short, federated identity technology will important for user-centric, ubiquitous computing across multiple organisations and this is obviously tomorrow problem, rather than today's one. But admitting this would harm adoption and that's why vendors will rather pretend all kind of nonsense to fool their way before everything is in place to make real difference.

10:51:30 PM    

A view on what is and isn't likely from a person who does have a clue: "The disaster planning associated with critical infrastructures is, by all that I have seen, ADEQUATE TO PREVENT severe loss of life, serious national security losses, loss of overall military and governmental capability, and unrecoverable economic collapse.

This is not to say that large-scale events cannot happen and that they cannot have large effect. They can. But the severity is not as horrific as many would have others believe. There are some pretty scary scenarios that can be cooked up, and some of them can probably even be made to happen IF WE POSTULATE a large enough and sophisticated enough attacker. But from all I can tell, there is no such attacker, and certainly there are none in the ranks of terrorists I know about or in the ranks of nation states I am aware of - the one exception being the US government itself." [RISKS Digest]. Very plausible.

12:04:06 AM