Clearly a bit removed from the kind of identity issues we were talking about all last week at Digital ID World, but nonetheless an interesting look into the importance of non-human identity and the role of the courts. Seems the ad campaign for Certs from around 40 plus years ago that they are "two, two, two mints in one" initially hurt its owner, Cadbury Schwepps, to the tune of millions of dollars in custom duties. The details, provided by Chris Gaither from the LA Times, cleverly titled A Case of Mint-staken Identity, describe how a court initially ruled that Certs did not qualify as something that "promotes oral hygiene", which I guess means it's just candy. Fortunately for them, their appeal won a reversal this past Wednesday. I'm sure the legal fees were only a couple times more than the tax ;-)

Today, Sun and Microsoft demonstrated cross-domain single sign-on into each other's environments using new specifications the two companies have been working on jointly, namely the Web Single Sign-on Metadata Exchange protocol and the Interoperability Profile.

You can view the entire webcast here. Pat Patterson, a Sun co-worker, shows up around 17 minutes into the press briefing, but you should watch the whole thing.

Pat and his Microsoft counterpart, Don Schmidt, do a great job of describing federation, how it works and the specific benefits companies can achieve as a result.

Way to go, Pat!

Here is my take on at least one version of Murphy's Law of Identity: Regardless of the cost related to potential identity theft, people will give up their password for a candy bar.

Now, how many of the passwords provided are real is another story, but based on what Nico Popp from Verisign shared during his keynote yesterday morning here at Digital ID World, it might be higher than you think. Nico told us that people freely gave their passwords when offered a $10 Starbucks card. Supposedly one guy, clearly too honest for his own good, said he forgot his password, went back to his office, got his password off some sticky note, gave it to his secretary and told her to go get him a Starbucks card. Incredible. Did he say they're doing it again today at the main entrance to the Hyatt Regency? :-)

What's your take?

Had to laugh when I saw my friend Pat take Kim Cameron to task for a language infraction on 4/22/05 where Kim said "dialog with them", instead of "talk with them". I was instant messaging with Jeff Hodges yesterday and commenting on how hip he was with his greeting of "D00d!". We both have a couple teenagers, so he pointed me to A parent's primer to computer slang. If you don't think leetspeak is going to end up in college term papers, whitepapers and press releases someday, you have no idea how much time these kids spend IMing. Save your verbiage venom, Pat, you're going to need it.

Sidebar: I came home one night and saw my oldest daughter's best friend in the kitchen. I knew she was spending the night and asked what she was doing on the laptop. "I'm IMing". I asked where my daughter was. "She's down in the basement on the computer". Oh. What is she doing? "We're talking".

Now for something that is really important. I love the Green Bay Packers. I own stock in the Green Bay Packers. My office is a shrine for the Green Bay Packers. For 17 weeks starting in September, the world rises and falls on whether the Pack wins or loses. Last Thursday I was AIMing with my good friend Nate, who is not only a fellow die-hard Packer fan, but also the source of most of my analytic knowledge about the Packers (ok, so I'm a lazy die-hard fan). Anyway, Nate was telling me that the Packers are a mess. Then he backed it up with details: Ahman Green got his 3rd domestic assault incident, Javon Walker was a holdout, Bubba Franks hasn't signed and wasn't in camp, Al Harris was charged with sexual assault (never a big fan of his anyway and now I know why), the 1st round pick (Aaron Rodgers) doesn't help them this year at all. As further evidence he shared that the Vikings have added 8 new and better guys to their defense (not to mention getting rid of Randy Moss).

I asked my co-worker Greg, another huge Packer fan, if he knew all of this. He said he did and wasn't worried at all. When I told my wife what Nate said her response was, "I'm not going to share any of this with the children. I want them to have a good summer". Maybe I better have Greg give her a call.

More depressing to me than thinking about a bad year for the Pack is all the baseball that is between now and the start of the season. But at least it does allow the kids to enjoy their summer. Lucky for them I'm just the son of a die-hard Cubs fan.

It may just matter which airline you choose to fly on some day, if you ever have an experience like Michelle Bearden. Michelle had her purse stolen on a trip to Phoenix and lost ALL her identification. She had a real identity crisis and it almost kept her from making it back home to Tampa. The most interesting part of the story to me was that even though the TSA requires a match of IDs to boarding passes, they allow each individual airline to make their own determination of how to handle passengers without a valid ID. Lucky for Michelle that Joe Hodas, spokesperson for Frontier, the airline she was traveling on, wasn't taking tickets that day. Joe's comment was, "I'm surprised she got on the flight". Frontier must be so proud of Joe.

On a recent trip my boss asked why I had a spare driver's license in my bag. I joked that it was because I was dead serious about high-availability and fault-tolerance. Now I'm thinking it isn't such a dumb idea after all. As many things as I've lost when I travel, I better call American and find out their no-ID policy right away.

The article also mentioned there are no stats on this problem, but I would hope that something of this nature doesn't encourage RFIDing humans. I know we've been doing that with pets for a while and I'm sure you're all as excited as I am that June 2005 is National Microchipping Month. However, I'm not quite interested in one for myself yet. I'll just hang loose in Phoenix.