Stamping Passport

Stamping Passport
Mark Burnett, 2005-01-10

Microsoft can save its ailing authentication service, but only by scaling back its expectations on what kinds of accounts Passport is fit to secure.

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Stamping Passport 2005-01-10
Anonymous

"Nevertheless, you could argue that having a single potentially insecure point of authentication is better than having a thousand potentially insecure points of authentication."

I'm sorry, what!? How can you possibly think that having a single point of failure for numerous sites is better than ha...

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Stamping Passport 2005-01-10
Todd Knarr

I think the third and fourth improvements are the critical ones. Passport failed, I think, primarily because it tried to provide users with one identity to use everywhere. That sounds good in theory, but in the real world people don't neccesarily want to have to give the same identity and authentica...

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Stamping Passport 2005-01-10
Tommy Ward

Passport failed because there is not a critical mass of end users who trust Microsoft.

We do need ubiquitious, trusted centralized authentication services, but MS is not the vendor that can garner the requisite trust. Actually, no software vendor is.

The USPS tried to do this in the mid-90'...

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Confusing article 2005-01-11
Nandkumar Saravade

After reading the article, I was quite confused about what it seeks to convey. Also, the number of Passport users has been quoted as 200 million in one place and 2 million in the other. ...

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Stamping Passport 2005-01-11
Anonymous

"I'm sorry, what!? How can you possibly think that having a single point of failure for numerous sites is better than having multiple points of failure for single sites?"

One point is definitely more secure than multiple points *if* you're using the same username/password pair on all the sites. P...

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little market for passport 2005-01-11
pixel

outside of microsoft themselves. sure it has 200,000,000 users, thats anyone on hotmail, msn etc. even slashdot has millions of users...

the lazy (or just not clued in) end users will simple use the same (probably rediculously simple) password everywhere, and most likely tell thier web browser to...

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