The most productive thing possible

With a schedule that’s suddenly become insane, I keep thinking about this poster I found a few years ago. Kidding — or serious?

I know. Maybe Kitty’s datebook could help!

New: “OpenID, Successful Failures And New Federated Identity Options”

Though there’s still a creepy fuzzy anonymous head where my picture is supposed to be, I’ve got my first post up on the Forrester Research Security & Risk blog. It discusses the recent 37signals decision to stop using OpenID and the larger “button-based login” environment in which OpenID can be considered a positive influence. As a bonus, it provides a new Venn diagram comparing features of OpenID + attribute exchange, the SAML web browser SSO profile, and OAuth + “connect”-style login.

Later: Neat, it’s been cross-posted to the CSO Online blog as well.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I’ve just made a big change, joining Forrester Research as a Principal Analyst, and this new adventure is sure to be exciting. It’s an honor to join this stellar organization and work with so many talented folks. I’ll be serving security and risk professionals and will focus primarily on identity and access management, so this move feels like a natural outgrowth of work I’ve been involved in for more than ten years now.

My tenure at PayPal was a great learning experience; I’ll never forget my time there, nor the good friends I made. I also managed to learn a few things while “catching up on life” in the few weeks between gigs. Here are some questions folks have been asking me, with answers:

Q: Are you moving back to the east coast?

A: Nope, I’m still based in the Pacific Northwest, but I will likely be out Boston-way somewhat more often. As for other appearances, you’ll definitely be able to find me at Forrester’s IT Forum 2011 in May, and I’ll be figuring out the situation with other events shortly.

Q: Will you continue to blog here?

A: Yes, though the mix of topics will likely change, as I’ll be contributing industry-related posts to the Forrester blog. I’ll post pointers to those here, and my hope is to step up my writing activity on other topics of interest at Pushing String. And I hope you’ll continue to follow my doings at @xmlgrrl (where the #forrester tag will likely make lots of appearances).

Q: What about User-Managed Access and other innovation-oriented work?

A: The plan is for me to continue in my role as “chief UMAnitarian” and to participate in certain other tech leadership activities as time allows. In the last couple of months we’ve gotten a big influx of active UMA contributors, and we’ve had a burst of progress in the last few weeks on defining how to loosely couple “user-centric” policy enforcement points and policy decision points. So I think we’re well on our way to meeting the goals and timing stated in our charter.

Q: So what did you do on your winter vacation?

A: One of my goals was to “learn one big thing”, so I started learning how to play guitar, under the tutelage of my dear old friend Rich. My original use cases were around communicating better with my Mud Junket bandmates who are actual guitarists, but Rich doesn’t fool around: I have to learn good technique and not take any shortcuts. Luckily, the fret-hand callus crop has finally started to come in.

I also read a great book called The Talent Code, which describes what goes on neurologically in people who seem like once-in-a-lifetime geniuses, and discusses how any skill (like guitar-playing!) can be honed more rapidly through “deep practice” that stimulates myelin growth.

With all this plus a healthy dose of R&R, it feels like I’m learning how to learn all over again.

Seeking escape velocity from nutritional Bizarro World

The new book from (The Great) Gary Taubes is finally out: Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It.

Taubes is obviously a man on a mission, nearly bursting with frustration at the anti-scientific and near-religious wishful thinking that has been passing for diet, nutrition, and public health advice for the last few decades. Near-religious? Yes — really. Why else would we be told this by “experts” for so long, even though their theories can readily be falsified?

If we’re fat and we can prove that we eat in moderation — we don’t eat any more, say, than do our lean friends or siblings — the experts will confidently assume that we must be physically inactive. If we’re carrying excess fat but obviously get plenty of exercise, then the experts will assume with equal confidence that we eat too much. If we’re not gluttons, then we must be guilty of sloth. If we’re not slothful, then gluttony is our sin. [WWGF, p. 29]

But Taubes keeps his vexation in check, using his energy instead to boil down the evidence in his magnum opus Good Calories, Bad Calories to its essence for easier reading. (You may recall that I once called GCBC “a 50/50 split between ‘gripping’ and ‘a hard slog’”.)

Most of all, he uses plain logic and helpful metaphors, along with tinctures of hard science and hard data, to show how diet experts’ arguments and advice — like “Just eat less and exercise more” and “Low-carb is dangerous because our brains need glucose to function” — amount to little more than “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” The logic and the data are useful for applying appropriate skepticism when you face the latest scientific paper that goes awry in its very first sentence by asserting that access to “unlimited calories” and an “increasing sedentary lifestyle” are the problem. Here’s something useful to know (and not all that surprising to learn): we’re exercising harder than ever.

…[I]n the United States … the obesity epidemic has coincided with what we might call an epidemic of leisure-time physical activity, of health clubs and innovative means of expending energy (in-line skating, mountain biking, step and elliptical machines, spinning and aerobics, Brazilian martial-arts classes — the list goes on), virtually all of which we were invented or radically redesigned since the obesity epidemic began.

There are many ways to quantify this epidemic of physical activity. Health-club industry revenues, for example, increased from an estimated $200 million in 1972 to $16 billion in 2005 — a seventeen-fold increase when adjusted for inflation. The first year that the Boston Marathon had more than 300 entrants was 1964; in 2009, more than 26,000 men and women ran. [WWGF, p. 42]

I suppose I’m no longer truly in the target audience for this book, since I can already recite many of the arguments in my sleep. And logic may have very little power over those with a vested interest in believing the opposite. But if you’ve struggled with weight (or — neologism alert — “diabesity”) and have been following along here but haven’t yet read GCBC, I recommend WWGF to you, either as a standalone work or as a gateway drug to the hard stuff.

Talking about security that “assumes DNS holds”

In discussions of economics, a predictive statement is often accompanied by the qualifier ceteris paribus, or, roughly, “other things being equal”, in order to compare apples fairly to apples. In discussions of Internet security, more and more I hear, and have occasion to use, a qualifier like “assuming DNS holds”. For a while, I used a stock formulation that went like “assuming DNSSEC or no cache poisoning”.

An awful lot rides on getting to the domain you think you’re getting to; it’s a basic ingredient in many web protocols. It lets you do things like treat unsigned metadata from a known-good domain as sufficient for lightweight use cases. And being clear about this assumption lets you compare solutions on their other merits.

UMAnitarian Joseph Holsten and I tried to cook up a pseudo-Latin equivalent for the economics phrase: ceteris nomina indubia, hoping to translate it roughly to “assuming non-doubtful names”.

But now I realize the first word isn’t right (ceteris is the “other things” part, like in et cetera), and we need something in the vindicatum or sumo category. Or we could just leave that part out, since “ceteris paribus” doesn’t have the “assume” part either. Any Latin scholars want to opine?

By the way, Pushing String has hit its sixth blogiversary. Thanks for sticking around!

Wishing you a happy, healthy, user-managed new year

Thanks to Domenico Catalano (@DomCat) for putting together this lovely and geeky holiday message! And thanks to all the UMAnitarians for their contributions of passion, business problem-solving, and technical know-how to the User-Managed Access work.

The end of 2010 has brought new progress on several fronts. The UMA-friendly Java-based OAuth leeloo implementation was released as open source; we’ve begun solving some hard problems in defining interoperable interfaces between OAuth authorization servers and resource servers; we’ve been teasing out the implications of trusted claims as the basis for user-centric access control; and we saw two significant submissions in response to the UMA validation bounty program. We’re grateful to submitters Cordny Nederkoorn, whose interest in UMA grew as a result of his explorations into cloud identity, and Project hData, a unique and important effort that seeks to make electronic health data amenable to RESTful web app treatment.

We’ve got lots more developments in store for the coming months, and we welcome your involvement. From our Kantara home page you can join the group (no membership fees!), subscribe to our mailing list, and check out the latest news, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.

Happy holidays!

The price for free online service, down to the last decimal

I’ve been thinking lately that websites should display a pie chart showing what you’re really paying for “free” online services, just to show that it really does always add up to 100%. Something like this:

Now Drummond points us to the world’s first truly honest privacy policy. A taste:

Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting you. And we’ve brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on how many ad networks and third-party data services we use.

Read the whole thing if you want to know exactly how to fit the price into your web-surfing budget.

People and online services: leaving value on the table

The recent Google-Facebook flap demonstrates that the hottest battleground for users’ control of the data they pump into these online services is the sites’ Terms of Service. Why? Because when you’re not a paying customer, you’re not in a hugely strong bargaining position. As I put it to ReadWriteWeb in their piece on data portability implications of the debate: Facebook’s end-users are not its customers; they’re the product. (Or as my Data Without Borders pal Steve Greenberg sometimes puts it, users are crops…getting harvested. Oh dear.)

For all “free” online services, it’s worthwhile to ask: What am I paying instead? If it’s not money, is it attention to ads? …behavioral cues about myself and my preferences? …personally identifiable data? …beta-testing time? …what, exactly? Payment for services rendered isn’t a bad thing. But it’s always something, and you might as well not be a chump.

That’s why I like Frank Catalano’s new TechFlash post viewing personal data sharing through an economic lens and discussing how to barter your data more equitably. Regarding his second point, “hide”: I’d actually be thrilled if more online services that were marketed to individuals offered a premium for-pay option; it would keep out the riff-raff and give people more meaningful control over their relationships with the companies offering the services.

It’s not just individuals who are leaving something on the table, though. I think there’s a big untapped market in selective sharing, which is like “privacy” (poor abused word), without the assumption that minimal disclosure is the be-all and end-all. What would you start sharing with a selective set of people and businesses, if you could have confidence that your expectations around context, control, choice, and respect would be met?

That’s why I think Dave McClure has it right with his notion of intimacy as a market opportunity Facebook currently has no idea how to address. (“maybe I only want to tell a few close buddies about that episode with the VERY BAD bean burrito” — yeah, thanks for keeping this sharing episode VERY selective. :-)

And that’s why I think Esther Dyson doesn’t quite have it right in saying privacy is a marketing problem. Her exhortation to “Know your customer, and talk to that person as an individual, not as someone in a bucket” has a natural barrier: Facebook and others are serving their actual customers very well indeed by, uh, making more product.

And that’s why I think User-Managed Access could help: Becoming paying customers of services that need our data is good. But becoming, in addition, producers of data products as peers in a selective data-sharing network, and dictating our own Terms of Access for getting to them, is even better.

UMA validator bounty program announced

Are you a software developer or tester? You might be interested in the new $4000 bounty program just announced by the Kantara Initiative for:

Develop[ing] material that assists in validating the compliance of implemented authorization manager, host, requester, and authorizing user/user agent endpoints to the UMA draft specifications (and their referenced external specifications).

The first deadline, to express submission interest, is November 1 — which happens to be the day we’re hosting a F2F meeting just ahead of IIW.

You can keep an eye on the status of the program at its dedicated UMA wiki page.

UMA meeting co-located with IIW and other news

Thanks to Phil and Kaliya and the gang, I’m happy to say we’re holding an UMA face-to-face meeting at the Computer History Museum on the Monday just prior to IIW XI (pronounced “yewksie”?).

This follows close on the heels of a face-to-face in Paris at the Kantara conference, so I hope we’ll be able to crank through a lot of work in the next few weeks. What work, you ask? We’re shooting for draft completion of some key items in the upper box shown here (click to get to a full-size site-mapped version on our Working Drafts page):

I’ve already gotten several requests for more info about the IIW meeting. These will be working meetings, not public transfer-of-information workshops, and we always welcome new participation. You can become a participant (voting/frequently attending or non-voting/attend at will, totally up to you) by filling out this form. I’ve put up some very preliminary agendas (Paris, Mtn View); they tend to be responsive to work done in weeks prior, so check back.

(UPDATE: There’s no formal registration process for the IIW meeting as long as you’re already signed up as an UMA participant; just send me an RSVP. Contact info is under my Welcome section in the right sidebar.)

Did you know our Newcastle University UMAnitarians have begun open-sourcing their Java implementation? The first big piece from the SMART Project covers UMA-friendly OAuth 2.0 and has the lovely name leeloo. They promise more to come soon, and I bet we’ll see some swank demos at IIW. Check it out!