By David Koenig
6:04 p.m. PT, Thurs., Jan. 17, 2008

PLANO, Texas - Personal information on about 650,000 customers of J.C. Penney and up to 100 other retailers could be compromised after a computer tape went missing.

Responses to "prediction" newsletters usually come in hard and fast, and last week's predictions newsletter was no exception. I'll be talking about some of those reactions over the coming weeks but today I want to concentrate on one particular area: the convergence of federation, role-management and provisioning - along with entitlement management - to produce real tools for collaboration.

 

I had a very interesting call with a guy responsible for a whole lot of identity stuff at a company we all would recognize on friday of last week. The "interesting" part began in him initiating the call (normally, I do such things). Come to find out that he was doing so because he was in search of "the next big thing" in identity (or what's on the horizon), and wanted to get my take on it.

When the opportunity arises, many people, both from Europe and abroad, are quick to pack their bags to live and work in different EU Member States. While their keenness and preparedness to explore a new culture is impressive, red-tape problems prove troublesome for many, including their governments, and concerns about crime related to identity theft are rising. Enter the GUIDE (Government User Identity for Europe) project, which targets supporting governments to apply common standards for the secure exchange of personal data.

 

Yahoo appears close to implementing OpenID, a Web authentication standard that relieves people of the need to remember multiple passwords to log into different Web sites. Yahoo controls a domain me.yahoo.com, which shows a short message indicating the company will act as an identity provider for OpenID. OpenID, an open-source project, has gained support from two other major Internet players, Microsoft and Google. However, those companies are not widely providing support on their sites for OpenID yet.