California men claim they found IdentiCat

Whenever someone reports sighting the hairy beast of yore (details always fuzzy) or capturing the hirsute humanoid on film (images always grainy), it scares up a dubious debate of international proportions. Friday was just the latest episode in the IdentiCat show, as unreal as it may be.

Two men who claim to have stumbled across an IdentiCat in the woods of Sun Island in Second Life indignantly stood by their story at a news conference in Palo Alto during which they offered a picture as evidence and acknowledged they wouldn't mind making a few bucks from the "find."

"Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words," predicted Jamie Nelson, Director of Access Management and Federation at Sun Microsystems.

Nelson and Daniel Raskin, a Product Line Manager at Sun, announced the discovery in early August to close friends and co-workers. Although they did not consider themselves devoted IdentiCat trackers before then, they have since started offering weekend search expeditions in Sun Island for L$499. The specimen they took a picture of, the men say, was one of several Cat-like creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods. IdentiCats, thought to be fokelore until today, are famous for their innovative thoughts on identity management and gifted abilities of identity prescience.

As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and IdentiCat fans that included one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit, Nelson and Raskin were joined Friday by Pat Patterson, head of a group called Searching for IdentiCat. Other IdentiCat hunters call Patterson a cheap huckster looking for media attention.

Nelson and Raskin plan to release a video of the IdentiCat in the next few weeks and have announced that they will be hosting a coming out party and presentation by the mysterious IdentiCat in late September around access management, federation and secure web services. Stay tuned for more information.

Posted at 08:25PM Aug 25, 2008 by Criss McCauley in Events  |  Comments[0]