Please Update to My New RSS Feed

If you subscribe to my blog using RSS, please update your feed reader with my new feed URL. I have been using Feedburner to source my feeds for a month or so now. Besides improving the feed quality a bit, it also insulates you from some changes I may be making to my blog in

Welcoming Jeff Shukis to the Oracle Blogs network

My colleague Jeff Shukis, who used to be VP of Engineering and Operations at Bridgestream, has started a blog of his own to talk about identity management, role management in particular. In his first post, he has started a deeper dive into the shortcomings of the NIST RBAC standard, an issue that I raised a

If you can’t trust Airport Security, who can you trust?

The latest to suffer an identity theft breach – the innovative CLEAR system that speeds frequent travelers through airport security by collecting personal data, doing an extensive background check and issuing smart cards. Stolen from a “locked” room in San Francisco  airport was a laptop with the data for 33,000 travelers. This line from the

Whoa! Talk about trying to spread FUD

A colleague of mine forwarded me this Sun blog post by Paul Walker commenting on the rise of Oracle IAM to leadership status. I read it with some amusement, as I remembered my days at Thor when I, a hard-working serf in a startup, would rail (in private, as I didn’t have a blog back

Johannes talks about the OpenID RP “Problem”

Johannes Ernst has responded to my post on what I view as a problem for OpenID – the proliferation of OpenID Providers without the emergence of Relying Parties that use them. First of all, let me state for the record that I am a big fan of OpenID, and in no way view this problem

The Optimist is feeling a little pessimistic

Seems like the recent Catalyst conference led the Eternal Optimist, Pam Dingle, to question how we are doing as an industry. It is true that a lot of the messaging has shifted from what enterprises need to accomplish based on their unique needs to “check-off the list” buzzwords like GRC (which Bob Blakely called a

OpenIDs problems don’t seem to be going away

I got news today that MySpace is joining the OpenID revolution. This supposedly brings the number of OpenID-enabled accounts to over half a billion. Maybe it looks like good news for OpenID, but isn’t this actually a problem? Isn’t the intent of OpenID to reduce the number of logins we have? Why am I moving

Is AD really the dominant Identity Store out there?

James McGovern has challenged my position that applications should not be written to go directly against AD. And he got the backing of Jackson Shaw in this argument. James says: If pretty much every Fortune 500 enterprise has Active Directory, why should any of them consider yet another product? Martin (no last name) left a

Delving deeper into Relationship-based RBAC

Ian Glazer thinks that I have opened Pandora’s box by talking about the need to bring context and intent into the area of RBAC by using relationships (one of many ways to express context). I think it’s a topic ripe for some discussion, so I’m glad to be the one taking the lid off. Mat