If an alternative did take root, his money would be on Salesforce to prevail. “There’s credibility for Salesforce being an enterprise identity provider,” Shaw says. “They have a legitimate claim for being an identity provider because so many people use salesforce.com. It’s hard not to run into an enterprise that’s not using Salesforce to some degree. Even small companies.
via Facebook vs. Salesforce: An Identity Smackdown? — Dark Reading.
The easiest decision is no decision. Let’s have two user interfaces, two modes: The easy mode for my mother-in-law, and the pro mode for engineers, McKinsey consultants, and investment bankers. Such dual-mode systems haven’t been very popular so far, it’s been tried without success on PCs and Macs. (Re-reading this, I realise the Mac itself could be considered such a dual-mode machine: Fire up the Terminal app, and you have access to a certified Unix engine living inside)
via iPad and file systems: failure of empathy | Technology | guardian.co.uk.
Ultimately, the chaos is breeding a whole new niche in Identity as a Service (IdaaS) that’s being tightly contested by vendors like Okta and Identropy and others like Centrifiy and Symplified. It’s an exploding market that Gartner says will make up a quarter of all new IAM sales by the end of 2014 and 40 percent by 2015,
via When Active Directory And LDAP Aren’t Enough – Dark Reading.
Not another x as a service acronym. IAM=Identity and Access Management
Even the original social networking sites behind OAuth decided they really need other options for different use-cases, such as Twitter’s xAuth, or Yahoo offering Direct OAuth, which turns the entire scheme into a more complicated version of HTTP Basic Authentication, with no added benefits. Perhaps the most damaging point against OAuth, is that the original designer behind it decided to remove his name from the specification, and is washing his hands clean of it.
Nina stands for Nuance Interactive Natural Assistant and was launched on the iOS and Android platforms last August, allowing businesses to integrate the sophisticated voice recognition and natural language engine into their apps.
via Human Interaction Under Threat from NINA – the Virtual Assistant – IBTimes UK.
This sounds like an interesting development offshoot from projects like IBM’s Watson (the computer that beat the best humans on Jeopardy). Then there’s this.
The days of human behind the counter or at the end of a telephone line at coming to an end. As voice recognition and natural language engines become ever more sophisticated, it may soon be hard to distinguish between an automated system and the real thing.
I am not looking forward to this day. Perhaps this is what HAL tried to warn us about in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Very prescient indeed.
The HTML5 Web Storage standard was developed to allow sites to store larger amounts of data (like 5-10 MB) than was previously allowed by cookies (like 4KB).
localStorageis awesome because it’s supported in all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox 3.5+, Safari 4+, IE 8+, etc.).
via Introducing the HTML5 Hard Disk Filler™ API » Feross.org.
TL;DR – An attacker can bypass Google’s two-step login verification, reset a user’s master password, and otherwise gain full account control, simply by capturing a user’s application-specific password (ASP).
via Bypassing Google’s Two-Factor Authentication – Blog · Duo Security.
Also From: Google Security Vulnerability Allowed Two-Step Verification Bypass – Dark Reading.
A successful attack would require first stealing a user’s ASP, which could theoretically be accomplished via malware or a phishing attack.
Under the standards put forward by the FIDO Alliance, the device a person is using to log in to an account would play a more central role in authentication. That would make it impossible to compromise accounts by stealing passwords, as hackers did in order to break into Twitter this month and LinkedIn last year.
Requiring a person to offer both a password and a physically linked secondary proof is an approach known as “two-factor authentication.”
“It used to be that because everything was behind the firewall, they could architect IAM with LDAP authentication and NTLM. But now they’re got the business line going out and driving so much via SaaS.”
via Is Identity The New Perimeter? – Dark Reading.
SaaS=Software as a Service
“There’s a clear trend toward white box — getting away from the model where everything comes pre-integrated from one vendor,” says Guido Appenzeller, Big Switch’s CEO. Any of the “hyperscale” Web/cloud players — the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon Web Services LLC — have “at least tried out white boxes in the data center,” he says.
via Light Reading – Intel Invests in Big Switch.
This is the first I heard of the term white box. The article is very informative. Here’s one more blurb that may help describe it better:
“You will see some of the largest customers in the world demanding some very specific mandates, one of which is standardization, which implies white boxes,” says Jason Matlof, Big Switch’s vice president of marketing.
The bottom line: The largest customers want open standards — probably to create a more competitive marketplace for the massive amount of boxes they need to buy. More competition = lower prices or better features or simply lower total cost of ownership.