Category: Insight IdM

Burton Catalyst 2009: Waiting for the World to Change

In my last post, I talked about the SIG meetings that I attended prior to the conference actually starting. There was lots of good content and discussion, which continued on into the actual sessions. I had thought of splitting my time between the Identity and Cloud Computing (new to Catalyst this year) tracks. But the

Burton Catalyst 2009: The Twisted Web We Weave

I’m finally settling back into work after a wonderful week out in sunny San Diego at Burton Group‘s annual Catalyst Conference. And it wasn’t just the weather outside that was wonderful. Inside you could find some thought-provoking sessions, inspiring discussions and great people. It’s given me way too much to blog about, and I hope

The Twitter Break-In: Anything to learn here?

The answer is: Plenty. In a nutshell, here is what happened as I understand it: A hacker named Hacker Croll (who has been a pain in Twitter’s behind for a while now) was able to gain access to the Gmail accounts of various twitter employees, including founder Evan Williams. He was then able to use

Welcome to the new Talking Identity

I know I’ve been quiet for a while. In large part, I lay the blame at the doorstep of the almighty Twitter. It made it too easy for me to get my thoughts out there without having to put too much effort into it 🙂 But it is partly also because I have been working

Are Social Networks the biggest threat to User Privacy?

Privacy advocates have long been raising a hue and cry about the negative impact social networking sites are having on privacy. For the most part, the glare has been on the poor security practices and privacy controls of these sites. But now researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have brought to light a

More Things about Federated Provisioning

My previous post on federated provisioning generated some interesting responses, both in the comments and in the blogosphere (see responses from Ian, Pamela and Pat Patterson). The topic has been so engaging (starting with Jackson Shaw’s post) that while I was writing this post I saw that Dave Kearns has made it the topic for

The Thing about Federated Provisioning

Ian Glazer recently blogged about federated provisioning, saying “Federated provisioning should not exist; there is only provisioning.”. Well, I think he’s both right and wrong about this. Let me explain. Suppose two companies, Acme and Omega enter into a federation agreement, whereby employees of Acme will be able to access a service at Omega using

International Data Privacy Day: Real Problems, Real Solutions

Wednesday, January 28 is International Data Privacy Day, honoring the anniversary of the Council of Europe Convention on Data Protection (No. 108), the most important international law for privacy. The purpose of this convention is to secure in the territory of each Party for every individual, whatever his nationality or residence, respect for his rights

Change We Need

It’s been a long time since I have been able to post. A lot conspired to make it difficult for me to keep up with my blogging, not the least of which has been a number of interesting, but under wrap, developments within the IdM group at Oracle (if you follow me on Twitter, you

Dissecting all the buzz about Identity Assurance

One of the big buzzwords this past month or so has been “Identity Assurance“. Liberty Alliance made a big push for the Identity Assurance Framework (IAF)at DIDW last month, conducting a number of sessions/workshops introducing it to the masses. Our old friend Frank Villavicencio, who is a co-chair of the IAEG, was a star at