MasterCard and Visa may be trying to whip merchants into shape with their carrot-and-stick approach, but legislators in Wisconsin seem to think that the force of law has a better chance.

Members of the IETF SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions (SIMPLE) Working Group have released an initial Internet Draft for "Optimizing Federated Presence with View Sharing." Presence federation refers to the exchange of presence information between systems. One of the primary challenges in presence federation is scale. With a large number of watchers in one domain obtaining presence for many presentities in another, the amount of notification traffic is large.

In late 2006, several companies got together and created the Identity Governance Framework (IGF), an initiative of the Liberty alliance. The purpose of the IGF is to provide an open architecture that addresses governance of identity related information. This architecture is meant to bridge the gap between regulatory requirements and the lower-level protocols and architecture. How can the inherent risks associated with the creation, copying, maintenance and use of identity data be mitigated? Who has access to what data for which purpose, and under what conditions?

Asa Hardcastle, OpenLiberty Technical Lead, has announced the beta release of the ID-WSF 2.0 Client Library ("ClientLib") that will help developers more easily build and deploy a wide range of new relying party (identity-consuming) applications. ClientLib uses OpenSAML's Java XML Tooling, SOAP, and SAML2 Libraries.

Written by Vittorio Bertocci, Garrett Serack and Caleb Baker, all of whom were part of the original CardSpace project, Understanding Windows CardSpace is deeply grounded in the theory and technology that came out of it... The presentation begins with a problem statement: 'The Advent of Profitable Digital Crime'. There is a systematic introduction to the full panoply of attack vectors we need to withstand, and the book convincingly explains why we need an in-depth solution, not another band-aid leading to some new vulnerability.