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Authentication is the Key
Posted by
michael
on Wed Jun 20, 2001 07:10 PM
from the are-you-the-Keymaster dept.
from the are-you-the-Keymaster dept.
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Authentication is the Key
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Missing the point (Score:3)
Unified authentication is not a piece of software. Certainly the software exists, but the information must be shared among different groups for it to be worthwhile.
As far as sensitive transactions on the internet goes, I use eBay, ING (for banking), Paypal, Chapters.ca, Amazon.com etc. I would like to be able to login to my personal computer or to my computer at work and have instant access to any of these services without remembering a password for each one. If I gave these companies permission to share my personal information I would not consider this an invasion of my privacy.
If, on the other hand, Microsoft took control of my personal information implicitly when I signed up for these services I would consider that an invasion of my privacy. Microsoft would, in effect, be saying "if you want to perform sensitive transaction on the internet you deal with me." I don't want to deal with MS.
What is needed is not a piece of software, what is needed is a standard format for sharing sensitive information and a standard legal contract by which you give a company to share your information with whichever companies you want the information shared with. A legal open standard similar to the GPL which would also include instructions on encoding and transmitting sensitive information would make universal authentication practical, with or without NC. We can make a contract that we're comfortable with and boycott companies that don't subscribe to it. This is how we'll beat Microsoft.
Passport (Score:3)
Guess what? Microsoft has already mined MSN and Hotmail and has it combined with Passport to create a ridiculously huge user base. Take a look at the Open Source sites (like any of those owned by VA in its OSDN sites). I think at last count there were something like 16 different sites each with a different name and password. How can a supposedly backward thinking company like Microsoft figure out how to leverage it's online websites and yet a company like VA Linux can't? Why is it that you can buy advertising across the entire OSDN network and yet you have to potentially use a different username and password for each of these sites? Why isn't VA doing a service like Passport that would not only tie OSDN sites together, but could potentially use a PAM module to tie your Linux login back into each of those sites?
It seems like the open source community is only going to 'get it' when people fire up Windows XP the first time and realise that they can login with their Passport/MSN/Hotmail accounts.
Re:the appeal of a single sign on (Score:3)
I can at least back up my hard drive. What happens to my passport credentials when Microsoft decides that I can't use them without paying for an "upgrade," and what happens when Microsoft gets hacked?
Heck, what happens when Microsoft "loses" my passport storage file. Microsoft doesn't guarantee that their site will be up, that they won't lose data, or that they won't be hacked. They don't guarantee that their prices won't go up, or that their service will even be available a year from now.
And if Passport becomes ubiquitous what is to stop Microsoft from using it to spam the lot of us? You think the EULA which specifically states that they can change ther terms of service is going to save us. To be honest, I don't even see Hailstorm as being all that useful. As a developer I personally am not really that interested in having my customers data on Microsoft's servers. I want to control my customers information myself. I want to have their email addresses, and mailing addresses in my database.
I imagine that Microsoft's competitors feel the same way, and now that Microsoft is a full-on media company they have a lot of competitors.
Re:the appeal of a single sign on (Score:5)
It's already been done. Mozilla will happily remember your usernames and passwords for as many sites as you like. If you wish you can password protect this information store (I believe that IE does something similar as well). This is a much better solution than putting all of the information about everyone in one huge database. Sure, some people will probably lose their passwords when their hard drives crash, and some will have their master password stolen by thieves. But I can guarantee you that if everyone's information was in one net connected database eventually someone would learn to steal that information from everyone (the only trick would be to steal the information slowly enough so that Microsoft wouldn't notice).
Of course, if you put me in charge of the database that would be a different thing altogether. I would never use it for nefarious purposes, and I would be very careful to make sure it never was stolen :).
The funny thing is that this could really work, but not if Microsoft insists on charging money for it. Heck, they should be giving away Windows XP and then hold everyone's data hostage.
The way network computing should work (Score:3)
What this will really mean, though, is: people don't buy PCs to put their data on. They buy servers to put their data on. They've finally gotten their 24x7 connection, and they're going to stick a box in the basement next to the other utilities. Then they can go anywhere and get their desktop from their computer at home.
For the first iterations, the box will also be the PC they use, but it will act exactly the same as if it were storing things remotely. Of course, it will act as a thin client for other people who want to use other home machines, and it will be a server for when they're at their friends' houses.
Later, of course, they'll want more places to connect from than they want central stores, and they'll want to upgrade their client capabilities (graphics, raw processing, etc) at a different time from when they upgrade their server (long-term hard drive space), and the server will fall out of use as a client.
All this will be possible in... 1996. At least, that's when I started doing it, at least as far as ssh, and then screen, which covers most of the things I actually want to do with a centralized configuration. MicroSoft will probably end up with a similar model (using proprietary parts, of course, so MS client with MS server does things that either doesn't otherwise do). Being the server is probably a stopgap for people who aren't yet set up to run the servers themselves; after all, serving files for people isn't all that exciting, especially if they get people to use software subscriptions and pay to run the file servers on their own machines.
Passport is version 1... (Score:3)
Petrely attacks the Passport services piece of
Most of us Microsofties are really more interested in the
I do think there is a want for a single signon for internet websites. I have to keep track of some 90 or so names and passwords for various web sites that I have used. It kind of sucks.
I guess the chief complaint I have with Passport is the stupid hotmail.com account. I really don't see why I need or want a free email account, especially since all I get is spam from it.
So if they could develop a system which was interoperable with my email address that I already have, well then. That'd be cool.
I don't know, I guess in a sense I suspect this Passport thing will have some limited success. I don't think it will become all encompassing though mainly because it's not totally desirable.
Similarly with some of the Hailstorm stuff. Truth is, I think these ideas are good, but I think they need to be decentralized, not centralized. I want to be able to access all my email, various files, whatever from anywhere. But I think that I could do that just as easily myself with the right software, or perhaps as a service from my ISP.
In that sense, I think Microsoft should sell the software, not the service.
Close, but not quite (Score:5)
Any one remember archie? The difference it made in using FTP? The key part of the phrase "You can find anything on the Internet" is *find*, it's not that any thing and every thing is on the Internet, it's that you can *find* it. (In some way, this is may be what Sun's CEO meant about not having any privacy -- there have always been records kept on people in all sorts of places, just now it is possible to find the records, index them, use them to *find* what you like, or *find* people that like certain things.)
File transfers have been around for a while now. Napster was interesting because it let people, tada, find the files they were looking for that other people have. eBay lets sellers find buyers. Social communities have formed up on the Interent because people have found other people who share similiar interests.
This probably seems all terribly boring, but think about it for a moment. If Microsoft does create a single sign-on authentication system, they will (potentially) have one of (if not the) largest online directory of people (competing with AOL.)
Authentication is just part of it. If Microsoft controls the directory services, they can control who (or what -- i.e. smart tags , etc.) can be found
Just look at the whole DNS root server mess, Network Solutions and such making money off of basically directory services. The battle over whether or not AOL will have an icon on the Windows desktop. Instant messaging -- which is basically the idea of presence (which appears to be one of the big buzzwords coming up), or rather, making it easier to be found.
Take a look at how much money is made from the sale of
Look, if you want to change the face of the network, the killer app is directory services. Online the map is literally the terrain -- the domain name system is the map we use to find things! That is, if you replaced the current DNS system with something new, that could change web browsing, email, all the services that depend on it to find people, places, and things.
Re:Old stuff (Score:3)
people are alowly accepting large organizations as the maintainers of databases w/all of our personal information. Do you really want MS to control EVERY single facet of your computer connection? I am scared enough of centralized databases of credit info that companies sell to each other for mass marketing, but I would be ESPECIALLY afraid of MS controlling 90% of every computer remotely...
Bill of Borg is really starting to get closer to reality
Who has MS convinced ?? (Score:5)
Can someone present an argument PRO
Re:Which means... (Score:4)
Nah, I've been in his office. There's no room.
And now that he's dating again, he might be more inclined to insist on a bit of privacy. (The collective response of the FSF people to Stallman's acquisition of a significant other after all these years was, basically, "Thank God!". This info is a good four months out of date now, though. Dunno how things are going in Boston...)
Re:not true (Score:3)
Smaller isn't impossible, just more difficult. (Score:3)
Here is a little anectdote relating to executable size
I recently recompiled my kernel, and put in the MagicSysRq support. I had been playing with fork, and the killall/nukem-now support it offers was attractive. However, can be dangerous, and as such you have to put a '1' into /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq before it will work. Putting a '0' in instead will also work.
Now, I wanted to be able to turn this on/off from my user account w/out going to root. A script wouldn't do it as /proc isn't world writable, and you can't suid a script safely. Therefore I needed a very simple binary program. Being the lazy person that I am, I wrote it in C++:
int main(){ofstream out;
out.open("/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq");
out << "1";
return 0;
}
Now, when I compiled it, I noticed that the filesize was a whopping 354K. 354K just to write a single character!!! That is way too much. So I decided to put it on a diet. First step: strip. Strip removes all of the debugging information from a file, which can really shrink it's size. It did, but still left a whopping 71K.
I then realized that the problem was using C++. So I switched to C, using file pointers, fopen, putc, and so on. This brought things down to a mere 12K. Stripping this brought a final size reduction to 3276 bytes. A very very slight reduction could be achieved by using the more raw calls to open() write() and close(), but only a couple of bytes.
Now, what is the moral of the story? It was a little harder to write the small version. I had to look up the exact semantics for fopen (I don't use C very often). I had to know about the existence of strip (or the -s flag for gcc will do the same). And I had to have the will to cut the size down. As a result I cut the binary to less than 1% of it's original size.
Now how many end-user apps:
The answer is "a lot"
Network computing is perfectly possible. It just takes a small amount of effort
Forget the privacy implications (Score:4)
Just consider for a moment the security implications.
You must remember that this is MS running the servers. Now, last I checked, they didn't exactly have a very good track record on security. Just think of what bad things could happen the first time somebody breaks into the Hailstorm servers and steals millions of people's login info at once. Or credit card info too, as there is talk about using Hailstorm to handle online purchasing too.
The very idea of a centralized single signon is moronic. I would hope that most people on /. realize that by now.
Re:Likelihood of .NET and hailstorm success is low (Score:3)
The problem is that while you're comfortable with data being on your machine, 99% of people (joe consumer) would rather it wasn't. They have no idea how to do backups, are uncomfortable with the idea of disk crashes, and (ironically) are used to the idea that computers just do go wrong even if they have no idea that it's our friends in Redmond that cause it.
So they want someone else to look after their data.
Hmmmm.
Dave
Re:MicroSquish for authentication? (Score:3)
That's alright. Remember when they knew precisely squat about the Internet?
In two to three years, Microsoft will have invented those technologies.
Re:So name the open source alternatives (Score:3)
Note that it is not solely for logging your UNIX box. Check out http://pam.sourceforge.net/mod_auth_pam/ [sourceforge.net] for an Apache module.
It's really a pretty cool solution and you can authenticate to almost anything: LDAP, RADIUS, even SMB.
Of course, there's still the problem of centralised control. What I would really like to see is a PGP or PGP-like solution where the user has control over their private key and each site grabs the public key when they sign up (with this, a signing up process could be transparent to the user). That way, you get the common authentication method and there's no need to store complete data about you anywhere but on your computer. Imagine getting a popup: "Whatever site has requested the following information:...." Each piece could be accompanied by a checkbox so the user can accept/deny specific pieces of information.
This is probably doable such that it will easily integrate into current systems, too.
Of course, I could be totally wrong, and I'd expect someone to point that out.
Re:Which means... (Score:3)
No, no no nooo. This is just another piece of pseudo-physics. In business, smaller does *not* mean 'quicker' -- in either the 'ability-to-change-focus-suddenly' or the 'ability-to-fully-exploit-an-opportunity-before-a
Small companies necessarily have homogenous portfolios -- they focus on one wee lil corner of the market, because they lack the resources to cover more. Any change of direction (or market) jeopardizes the company; hence, alterations in course are 'expensive', probablistically speaking. OTOH big companies can follow a zillion different speculative trails to their logical conclusions *simultaneously*. Think of quantum computing. Now, if 99% of those trails end in failure, so be it; the company naturally 'collapses' its waveform onto the remaining one percent and be extremely successful.
The reason why small companies appear to be quick is the same reason that dust motes seem to be 'everywhere' when you wave a flashlight around in a darkened room: The sheer number of small businesses make it very probable that a handful will be at the right place at the right time for any given opportunity, never mind the hundreds of unlucky failures, floating in the dark!
Now how's that for pseudo-physics?
Which means... (Score:4)
Nice diversion!
Sarcasm aside, Microsoft is still a big corporation... and smaller means quicker. So it's not really about Microsoft sneaking anything past us... it's about the quality of our decisions and actions, and how effective they are to counter moves by Microsoft.
But hey, the best solution is to just give in, buy their stock, and move to a remote Pacific island to live off the profits. Or, alternately, move in with Stallman and start amassing the GPL cult that will eventually take over the world like... Pac Man...
The problem? (Score:3)
What microsoft has always been good for is successfully implementing the grandiose ideas that nobody else could. Do you remember the Windows 3.1 days? If you had a new graphics card or new printer, what was the only thing that could talk to it? That's right, MS Windows. And MS shared the love by allowing any program running within it to talk to those devices as well.
And now there's network computing, with its related monstrosities, central directory and PKI infrastructure. Many big heads have tried to tackle these; none has come close to success. These are ideas that would expand the usefulness of computers beyond belief, but they can only be pulled off if there's a strong center to hold everything together.
In case you're worrying that "center" means monopoly, think again. The center is shrinking! MS is no longer trying to have a stranglehold on the Apps or the OS, just the authentication and the basic protocol which can be run on any hardware. We should rejoice!
Unlike visa or doubleclick, they're not trying to put themselves in a position to snoop on you. They're trying to give us something that no one else can.
--
MicroSquish for authentication? (Score:5)
The long and short of it is, MicroSquish knows precisely *squat* about multi-user computing, data security, and crypto.
When Hugh Daniel went up to Redmond to do interoperability testing between FreeS/WAN and their half-assed IPSEC, he asked them which crypto algorithms they'd implemented, and they told him "40-bit DES". Nothing else.
Hugh just left. I would have, too.
-jcr
Likelihood of .NET and hailstorm success is low (Score:5)
MY data is one SOMEONE ELSE's machine.
Even if you have a local backup that introduces issues with consistency. And just who is reading your work? Why will people suddenly trust a third party to provide their environment? It didn't work for Sun in the 90s (which although Petreley mentions MS fought, was not a failure because of MS opposition) and it won't work for MS now - in fact this could be the undoing of Microsoft. We have huge, cheap hard drives, great technology like IMAP, and software that works. I can't see the compelling advantage.
no no... the Wizard said it best... (Score:3)
"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
Superior windows authentication (Score:3)
It's a matter of trust (Score:4)
A piece of software is not enough so just having an open source alternatvie is not the issue. We are talking about a user's data here and what is going to be done with it. Sure, you could do it with open source tools, but who is going to actually store the info and handle the authentication?
I can see a private company (or more than one) coming forward to accept user's details and provide authentication to web sites, but they are likely to be just as bad or worse than MS.
The other problem is trust - you can build it, but why would users register their important info with someone they've never heard of before. You and I may not trust MS, but plenty of people will (and do).
What is needed is a large, recognised group which can provide authentication, funded by micropayments, advertising or contributions and backed by names that people will come to trust. I think this would be a perfect service for the government to provide, although I imagine many people here will be pretty dirty on that idea. But what the hell, they already have all your info and at least they wont play silly buggers with preferred partners and closed standards.
The only other possibility is an open consortium or perhaps financial companies (someone like paypal), but the possibility will still be there for abuse.
Unless someone can come up with a way of using a decentralised system like freenet to provide secure authentication, but I can't see people trusting that either.
NC? (Score:4)
Until NC's can deliver the same punch as a PC continuously (in terms of performance and customizability), people will continue to purchase PC's.
-- The Hollow Man
Why I'm Not Using Windows Anymore (Score:3)
These types of actions on Microsoft's behalf is exactly the reason why I bought an Apple iBook with OS X recently, learned how to use Unix over the last four years, and put a LINUX firewall between my Microsoft machines and the Internet--I don't trust M$ products enough to hang a Winbox's bare ass off the network like I would Linux or OpenBSD.
I don't mean to sound like a Slashdot M$ basher. I have my reasons...
I can't find the link right now, but Microsoft and the NSA have backdoors into your system. Microsoft doesn't deny NSA involvement, either.
Given their past history, anyone who uses .NET is either ignorant, foolish, or just doesn't care.
Where do you want to be violated today?
So name the open source alternatives (Score:4)
Surely someone somewhere in GPL land has written some code that let's you do what their passport software does. If so let's hear about it!
Sun is as bad as M$ (Score:5)
while I appreciate raising the alarm - this is an insightful piece - I couldn't help but wonder why he thinks NC would have been good under Sun's control. Clearly .NET will be a nightmare under the monopolistic control of M$ - but Sun is just as hungry for monopoly as Microsoft, and would hardly have shepherded the concept any more benevolently than M$ would. The NC *was* a failed concept and for good reason!
not true (Score:5)
The key is that when Hailstorm gets integrated into applications (instead of being "on the web") people won't feel as uncomfortable with it. They won't even notice its happening.
Imagine that some music distribution company offers a jukebox like system where you pay a small amount of money to instantly play a song. If they teamed up with MS, they could install this ability in MS Media Player to log you into Hailstorm so you could "securely" transmit finaical information neccesary to get the song. And the normal user barely even notices becasue all the info gets typed into regular windows dialog boxes that don't look anything like the "scary, unsafe" web. For the music industry its great because they don't have to worry about keeping user accounts and the security. For MS its great becasue they get money even though they have nothing to do with music. Hell, that might even make it easy for artists to directly charge for music. Easy distribution, and easy money collection. It works with anything. Like the MLB's plan to charge people for the game broadcasts.
Its all perception. People get scared only when they take out their credit card and type it into the computer. Imagine MLB get you to type in your credit card just once into Hailstorm. From then on all you'll see is a dialog box that pops up saying "Do you want to buy this? YES NO" Peopel will just hit yes and barely think about. Since all the info is already in Hailstorm, you won't need to retype your cc.
Once people are in the system and comfortable with it other companies will dive in. Make the same modification to Internet Explorer and then companies can sell you stuff over the internet using Hailstorm as the payment scheme (a la PayPal)Companies probably won't even give you any option other than paying via Hailstorm since its a lot easier for them.
And this is exactly what the article is getting to. MS suddenly becomes the doorway to a whole host of services. In other words _everyone_ is dependant on MS. MS can raise prices however they see fit since comapanies would need the MS user db to conduct transactions.
Re:Two .NETs at issue here (Score:3)
the appeal of a single sign on (Score:4)
Is there a good open source alternative that can provide the same experience?
Re:Forget the privacy implications (Score:3)
What you do is, whenever you register with a site, you write down your username and password in a little notebook.
Don't actually write your password, just something to remind you what the password is.
Amazing eh ?
I think I'm going to patent the idea.
As always, Cosmo said it best... (Score:5)
The film was about 10 years too early, but it amazes me how much it captured.
Makes perfect sense, really. (Score:5)
If you can keep the appropriate people focussing their attention on trying to justify themselves, even against rather pointless and ineffectual attacks, they don't get quite as many people thinking "what are they up to?" as they would if they were just getting on with quietly rolling out their .NET plans - they're quite obviously whinging lamely about open source, right?
By giving the more zealous and vocal open source advocates a giant red "Kick Me!" sign to fire at (and fire they will; the target's too good to pass up), then commentary on the other things they're doing might just get lost in the noise.
Welcome to the Machiavellian world of PR. It's a lot more difficult to meta-moderate out there, and Microsoft is trolling.
Two .NETs at issue here (Score:5)
I'm sure the fact that you can buy a complete PC for what a NC cost had nothing to do with their demise.
As far as .NET is concerned the issue of authentication is overblown a little. People seem to focus on the evil-looking parts of .NET like authentication services and ASP software, and forget about what .NET really is. It is a runtime, like Java, that can run code written in several different languages. That part of it will succeed. The authentication stuff however will go down the tubes just like the ASPs are doing now.
There is not a widespread need for third-party authentication. Certainly not enough for there to be widespread services that everyone uses. The ASP model has failed to a large degree as well. If the 3rd party goes down(as MS has often done) or tanks as a business you are hosed. Most people won't risk this.
The part of .NET that will succeed is the programming model, because it does solve a need for a lot of programmers.
So what we have really is 2 .NET's, one which will succeed, and one which will not do so well.
Re:NC? (Score:3)
The NC isn't necessarily a terminal with no hard drive and a crummy processor. The central premise is that your data lives in a central location that you can access from anywhere. I would love to be able to access my MP3s from my car or edit code while kicking back at the beach. That is the power of the NC.
Re:Forget the privacy implications (Score:3)
Problem is that it's also moronic that next spring when I buy new seeds from Burpee, I'll have to either remember the password that I created in 1999 (and can't have sent to me because I'm at a new email address) or spend 10 minutes creating a new account and lose my history. Or that I find myself registering on sites as "jsngr8" or something like that because I've already created and lost 8 accounts there.
I don't know what the answer is, and I sure hope it's not putting Microsoft in charge of a single unified login -- but the methods that made sense in 1996 just aren't going to cut it any more.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Similar CNET Article (Score:3)