Your Passport
Regarding the issue of passwords and registration on multiple sites,
that's exactly what Microsoft Passport aims to solve: you authenticate
once with a single username and password (username being your email
address), and then you're automatically authenticated across the entire
system. When you come to a site that uses Passport, guess what? You're
already logged in. You'll be able to selectively allow sites to access
various levels of information. Shopping at an online book store? They
can have your name, address, and credit card information. Going to your
bank web site? They can also have your credit history, tax information,
etc. Going in for a dentists appointment? They can have access to your
name, address, public calendar to schedule appointments, credit card
information for billing, and even your insurance company for immediate
filling of claims.
Passport is new and very unproven (security is the primary concern for
most people), but the theory is rock solid. People may complain about
Microsoft and it's “monopoly”, but they're trying to create something
that will truly make the online experience more consumer friendly. Sure,
they'll find a way to make money off it – they're a business after all -
but what have AOL, Sun, Netscape, Oracle or the other anti-Microsoft
companies done lately to improve the online experience for consumers?
Nothing. [Jason Dunn]
4 Comments
Anonymous
April 5th, 2002
at 12:02pm
Absolutely. And single sign on is a great idea. And wouldn't it be nice if Passport used an open wire protocol like they said .NET Myservices was going to. Instead, they have merely token support for non MS platforms that is essentially unuseable unless you have su access to your webspace. So that locks out 30-40% of all the websites out there. If it was actually using SOAP, then I could play with PHP or Perl. But as long as it's C++ and Apache mods I'm stuck.
IMHO, if they want Passport to be a real success, they need to be much more inclusive with people running web sites on non MS platforms. They did a pretty god job about getting the Frontpage extensions installed everywhere. It's time to do it again.
Anonymous
April 5th, 2002
at 12:16pm
“but what have AOL, Netscape done lately to improve the online experience for consumers”
<cough>mozilla</cough>
Anonymous
April 5th, 2002
at 1:11pm
Given Yahoo's current BS about pulling my phone number and mail address from ONE order I placed with a Yahoo store over a year ago, then putting it on their spam list under my Yahoo ID….
It'll be a cold day in hell before I give out my real contact info to any online site in the future. Amazon's got it, Yahoo (gulp) has it, a few other online vendors have it, but you know what? Yahoo has hurt other Internet businesses by doing what they did – I am reconsidering any online purchase I make, esp. with the big boys (Ironically, I'm less concerned with the smaller guys).
Which means I'll probably never, ever, ever post any of my private info through .net or Passport if I can help it.
Unless of course eBay decides to pull a Yahoo! and give their increasing partners over at Passport all my private eBay and Billpoint info.
Sigh….
Anonymous
April 9th, 2002
at 9:21am
“mozilla”
Isn't that some sort of cheese?