Hey, it’s my second blogiversary

Time flies like an arrow. Thanks to my readers and commenters for their continued support!

(Posted by means of my ancient but beloved Treo 600 — Because I Can.)

Seeing Dreamgirls tonight turned out to be…

…a perfect way to celebrate James Brown and acknowledge his passing.

In this movie Jennifer Hudson and Beyoncé Knowles both rise to the rank of Goddess. Do not miss it.

Five out of five!

I managed to infect all five of my victims successfully — Conor, Pat, Paul, JeffH (on his personal blog Eclectic Reflections, not on IdentityMeme), and John. (Although beware: You have to apply the not() filter to everything in JeffH’s post, contrarian that he is.)

Tim and I were comparing notes. He gets a style point for infecting someone from a distance but made the mistake of thinking he can get Lauren to do anything she doesn’t want to do. So I think I win. :-) (Hmm, I’m getting as blog-competitive as some other folks I know…)

Conor as much as admits a woman didn’t instigate the trouble (though I’m sure he mentally added “this time”, harrumph). Michelle, who I mentioned in my post but spared in my tagging, does the classic “I don’t care who started it, I’m stopping it right now” bit, but is nice enough to share five things anyway. If that doesn’t count as informed consent, I don’t know what does.

The five-things virus

Uh, thanks, Tim. I think. (And congrats on becoming a Distinguished Engineer!)

Here’s a list of five things most people probably don’t know about me:

1. I have a bit of graphite embedded in my left palm from a knife game — only with pencils! — gone awry when I was five years old.

2. I have a severe case of bovilexia.

3. There are nine distinct versions of Bohemian Rhapsody on my iPod:

   • The original (three copies, from A Night at the Opera, Queen Greatest Hits, and the Wayne’s World soundtrack)
   • The live version from the Wembley ’86 concert
   • The We Will Rock You musical soundtrack (coincidentally recorded in London soon after the first time I saw it there)
   • The London Symphony Orchestra version
   • A rap version by Molotov on a Spanish-language “tributo a Queen“
   • Two substantially different versions by the Braids (a capella and instrumental), along with two extra mixes based on these
   • Two versions (Constantine and the Flaming Lips) off the intermittently amazing Killer Queen: A Tribute to Queen album (if you like the song Stone Cold Crazy, check out this version)

   And I don’t even have the ID Gang Choir’s version of Bohemian Rhaps-ID on there yet.

4. I have performed in a strip club.

   I used this in playing a game of three truths and a lie with Sara Gates, Michelle Dennedy, and some other great folks at a conference last year, so I guess they know this about me, at least. It was supposed to be the one “ringer truth” that everyone would assume was a lie, but I got tripped up by Michelle, who independently joked, just before my turn, about my “stripping career”… In fact, my first band Sleeper did play in a club (I think it was somewhere on the Pearl Harbor military base) that did indeed have, y’know, dancers as part of the entertainment. A weird experience, especially since the poor dancers had to cue up their own music on the jukebox.

5. I think watermelon-flavored Jolly Ranchers are an abomination.

Conor, Pat, Paul, JeffH, John: tag, you’re it! (As if there’s anything left we don’t know about Conor. Or Paul.)

Just doing my part to be a vector…

[UPDATED to fix link to John's blog.]

Sweet, sweet electricity

Not being the camper type, I can’t recall ever having gone without electric power for this long. It went away for 48 hours, from Thursday 2am to Saturday 2am, and oh, how wonderful it is to have it back.

On Friday I camped out in a hotel lobby in in a tiny pocket of Bellevue that happened to have power and wifi, and was able to conduct my work day almost normally. I was surprised at how inhospitable the ground floor of an Embassy Suites is. The rooms are arranged around a hangar-like enclosed space, half of which has a big TV blaring and lots of tiled flooring, and half of which has a waterfall creating lots of echoey white noise. But kudos to the folks working there; they all pitched in when people, including many families with young children, started streaming in to get some warmth and a burger.

On Friday night we joined hundreds of others in descending on the one city block that happened to be not-dark, and luckily for us, it had five open restaurants and a multiplex cinema. There was that feeling of everybody being in the same boat — along with the sensation of being warm, dry, safe, and full of beer — that made it fun.

I think Eli and I did all right in terms of being prepared and flexible, but we’ve now fully assimilated some of the obvious lessons:

Monocultures are bad. We benefited from having a gas (not electric) stove and wireless communication devices (whose cellular system creaked under the strain but didn’t break entirely).

City living has more dependencies. With no elevator service, we walked the six (in our case) flights from apartment to garage and back lots of times in the last two days, and some residents were finding the going pretty difficult. Even leaving the building was tricky at first, since the electrically operated gates had to be laboriously hand-cranked open. (In the doing, Eli graduated from “junior condo board member” to full-fledged.)

Redundancy is handy. We dug out blankets we normally never use because they’re too heavy, and had enough extra batteries and canned food to be able to offer some to friends. It’s trickier to achieve some kinds of redundancy in a small apartment, but doable with planning.

Blackout survival guides are not very helpful. The several I’ve found online were pretty thin, beyond advice about how long your frozen food will stay that way, so I’ve begun a highly personal checklist for myself that’s full of MUSTs, SHOULDs, and MAYs. One MAY: Grind some extra coffee beans when bad weather is approaching; Maxwell House instant from the emergency kit may keep your core body temperature up just as well, but French-press keeps your spirits up better!

Here’s hoping everyone in the area gets power back soon and stays safe.

Can’t do this to me, baby

I’m wondering if this was more fun in the doing than in the watching, but hey, you be the judge — Conor has posted a (subtitled!) YouTube video of our performance! Thanks a million to Conor for doing this. By the way, Peter Tapling of Authentify, one of my co-perpetrators on this, sent me a note suggesting that the title of the song should be Bohemian Rhaps-ID. Most excellent.

So now, a little more of the backstory. When Kaliya asked me to help with the un-talent show, I asked some friends ahead of time what I could do to encourage participation. I knew there would be a karaoke setup there, though we didn’t want to have to pull that out of the bag first thing, to give people a chance to perform with a guitar or whatever. My sister-in-law does some DJing, and she’s the one who suggested the idea of writing parody lyrics (thanks, Leah!).

I had absolutely no time to think about doing this until I got through my SAML/Liberty Alliance/federation presentation on Monday, and found myself tossing around ideas with my dinner companions, whose names you can see listed as coauthors, on Monday night. It’s all Laurie Rae’s fault, really — she was like a dog with a bone. Being totally honest here, I was like that with getting the lyrics done, but she actually promoted it and got our “choir” lined up.

She suggested doing something with Summer Lovin’, and then a Talkin’ ‘Bout My Federation parody (which has possibilities — maybe at the next IIW? who’s in?). Once we thought of BoRap, I pulled up the original lyrics on my Treo and we worked from there. Peter Tapling was astonished, nay, actually somewhat disturbed that we saw it through — and he brought over someone after the performance who insisted we couldn’t possibly have written it the previous night.

Luckily, this wasn’t the only performance at the un-talent show! John Kemp and Pat Patterson performed Whole Lotta Love, I did a Hotel California duet with Kelly Mackin from CA and an I Got You Babe duet with Laurie, and Nick from Silent Rhino (I hope I got that right!) recited I Am the Clorox and I Speak for the Me’s, which was awe-inspiring.

I’ll update this post sometime today with a link to my photos from the event. You won’t want to miss ‘em, especially the Whole Lotta Love ones…

UPDATE: No, not about the photos yet, but about the gong. I’m not sure exactly what possessed JeffH to bring it with him, but he’s local and he’s a drummer, so QED, I guess! Kaliya used it throughout the IIW event to signal session transitions and such. Just imagine how wide my eyes got when we worked through the whole set of lyrics and I realized…what comes at the end.

UPDATE 2: Okay, photos are up! Here’s a teaser.

To see my whole collection of un-talent show pix, go here. Wes has a bunch of good ones from the un-talent show and the event in general too.

Tag: iiw2006b

She knitted something fast

…and I don’t mean “she completed the project quickly.”

Riffing on personae

I have to agree with Dave Kearns that chatting face-to-face is an extraordinarily efficient way to gain better understanding! It’s also quite pleasant. This IIW event was a blast for me. I’ve got a lot of notions bumping into each other in my brain from the experience; I’ll try a few of them on you now.

Dave was poking at my notion of a persona: He doesn’t think it needs to exist. To be honest, I don’t mean to be carrying water for the concept of a persona — I’m neutral on it until I can see it in practice. But the model I explored here helped me to imagine how it could be defined operationally (rather than in philosophical and hence somewhat vague terms), and thus how it could come into common practice someday. In the persona conversation, I’m mostly interested in how I can define policies in a way that’s reusable across multiple transactions, even when I’m not even online (e.g., in web services interactions for that “break-glass” scenario), and the notion of having alternate URLs that stand for each policy bucket (allowing me to avoid creating multiple independent identities that duplicate information) was kind of appealing. Maybe identifiers aren’t the best way to do this, though; lots of other mechanisms come to mind.

(By the way, I’m told that MyOpenID.com has implemented something like a persona feature, but I haven’t been able to get an identity going successfully over there yet. I’ll keep at it.)

Dave talks about multiple identities possibly being in the same “namespace”, which could be like the persona picture I was painting. I’m not sure what “namespace” means here, but I didn’t mean to imply anything about a namespace in which persona identifier vs. a digital identity identifier resides, other than the DNS domain (since we’re talking URL-based identifiers here). Beyond the xmlgrrl.com stuff for discovering my IdP and various metadata about it, a relying party can’t safely guess whether /eve, /xmlgrrl, /eve/lowrisk, /elm, /eve-lynn, and /eves-sister correspond to one subject or not, or whether they “resolve to” a single identity’s worth of data. I do take Dave’s point here — as far as the RP is concerned, this is a digital identity. The only characteristics that make it anything more have to do with the “profile management” that happens exclusively under the control of the human and the user interface offered by his/her IdP.

Tag: iiw2006b

Bohemian Rhapsody in the key of ID

On request, here are the lyrics to the parody song performed tonight at the IIWb “un-talent show” by what Kaliya calls the ID Gang Choir. Many thanks to my co-writers and co-performers, who were apparently game for anything! (When I’m less tired I’ll put up some of the pix and maybe share more of the backstory…)

Bohemian Identity

a parody of Bohemian Rhapsody by Eve Maler, Laurie Rae, Peter Tapling, Derek Fluker, Bill Johnson, and Wes Kussmaul, with apologies to the late great Freddie Mercury

Is this the real life, or a directory
Caught in the OSIS, no escape from identity
Open your I-D to be spied and see
I’m just an agent, and I’m an entity
Because I ask who am, I to you, I don’t care, I thought you knew
Any way the claim flows doesn’t really matter to me, to me

Mama, just killed a man, his name is password hell, and he’s not encrypted well
Drama from websites outdone, Web 2 dot 0 had blown them all away
Passport, ooh, didn’t mean to make us cry
If my session’s gone away this time tomorrow
Single off, single on, as if nothing really matters

Login, the time has come, time to prove what’s mine is mine, fingers aching all the time
Logout everybody, I’ve got to go, when I broke that seventh law I faced the truth
Mama ooh (any way the claim flows), I must now rely, on attributes not seen before at all

I see a little silhouetto of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening me
Authorizer (authorizer), authorizer (authorizer)
Authorizer LID – O-pen I-D
I’m just a token nobody knows me
He’s just a token from a weak authority
Spare him his life from anonymity
Single off, single on, will you authorize
Bismillah! No, we will not authorize (authorize)
Bismillah! No, we will not authorize (authorize)
Bismillah! No, we will not authorize (authorize)
Will not authorize (authorize)
Will not authorize (authorize)
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
Mama mia, mama mia, mama mia authorize
Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me

So you think SAML2 can solve all your use cases
Let me SXIP in and OpenID some CardSpaces
Oh baby, can’t do this to me baby
Just gotta sign out, just gotta sign right outta here

But it really matters, AuthN and authZ,
Yes it really matters, it’s all that really matters – I-D

Any way the claim flows

(Written on 4 December 2006 and performed on 5 December 2006 at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA. Creative Commons license: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.)

Tag: iiw2006b

Identity love triangle

There’s a picture that I hadn’t seen a lot of, but has recently been making the rounds more actively. It purports to characterize the modern identity management space as a whole. Johannes has updated it as of yesterday. I’m going to steal a bit of Johannes’s bandwidth to provide the picture here for reference, but please click on it to go and read his post.

Conor takes issue with the diagram, and Paul comments further, giving an example of how it could mislead. I have to say I’m sympathetic to their points. It’s hard to boil a complex space down into a simple picture, yes, but I think this single-dimension graphic does everything in the space a disservice in one way or another.

I’m going to make another observation. Now that there’s adoption vector information in the picture, what jumps out at me is that CardSpace has focused on making inroads on the client side, OpenID has focused (to the point of offering a bounty!) on adoption by relying parties, and SAML and the Liberty Alliance have focused on adoption by identity providers. Many of the folks at the Liberty table are “users of identity technology” rather than identity management technology vendors — and they generally happen to be large repositories of user accounts.

(By the way, I notice that Liberty announced a bunch of newly joining members today:

The newest members of Liberty Alliance are 2FA, Agència Catalana de Certificació, British Telecommunications PLC, Bronnoysund Register Centre, City University (London), Credentica, Danish Biometrics Research Project Consortium, Danish Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation, DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, Drummond Group Inc., Fugen Solutions, Inc., Fulvens Ltd, fun communications GmbH, Gemalto, GeoFederation, Hochhauser & Co., LLC, Luminance Consulting, Mindsphere AS, PayPal, Software Innovation ASA, Telefonica, Telenor R&D, Thales e-Security, Oslo University, University of Ottawa, University of Washington School of Law, UNINETT AS and the Sunderland (UK) City Council.

Impressive list, and it includes PayPal… Fascinating!)

Obviously it takes three to tango, so — just as obviously — we all need to keep improving our communications and the connections among the systems. In that spirit, for those who saw my talk yesterday and saw the cute little SAML teddy bear offering a great big hug, here’s where you can go to get your very own…

Tag: iiw2006b