These are my notes from the session Who Is the Dick on My Site? by Dick Hardt

This was a talk about the services provided by Sxip Identity which identifies itself as an 'Identity 2.0' company. Dick Hardt started the talk by telling us his name 'Dick' and then showing us images of lots of other people named 'Dick' such as Dick Cheney, Dick Grayson, Dick Dastardly and a bunch of others. The question then is how to differentiate Dick Hardt from all the other Dicks out there on the Web.

In addition, Dick Hardt raised the point that people may have different personas they want to adopt online. He used women as a classic example of multiple persona syndrome given that they constantly change personalities as they change their clothes and hair. He used Madonna as a specific example of a woman who showed multiple personalities. I personally found this part of the presentation quite sexist and it colored my impression of the speaker for the rest of the talk.

So how does one tell a Web site who one is today? This usually involves the use of shared secrets such as username/password combinations but these are vulnerable to a wide variety of attacks such as phishing.

Besides telling sites who I am it would be nice to also have a way to also tell them about me so I can move from site to site and just by logging in they know my music tastes, favorite books, and so on. However this could lead to privacy issues reminiscent of scenes from Franz Kafka's The Trial or George Orwell's 1984. There should be a way to solve this problem without having to deal with the ensuing privacy or security issues. I can't help but note that at this point I felt like I had time warped into a sales pitch for Microsoft Hailstorm. The presentation seemed quite similar to Hailstorm presentations I saw back in 2001.

Dick Hardt then talked about various eras of identity technology on the Web

• Identity 1.0 - directory services and X.500
• Identity 1.5 - SAML and other technologies that enable business partners to assert identity information about individuals. They require trust between the identity provider and the relying party
• Identity 2.0 - user-centric identity models such as InfoCard

Sxip Identity has shipped v1.0 of their technology but has gotten feedback that its customers would like it to be a standard. They have now begun to investigate what it would mean to standardize their solution. One of their customers is Ning who used their technology to add identity management to their site in 12 minutes.