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.

Asa Hardcastle, Technical Lead for the openLiberty ID-WSF ClientLib Project, announced that the ClientLib Alpha is now available online. The ClientLib uses OpenSAML's Java XML Tooling, SOAP, and SAML2 Libraries. The Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF) is a set of open specifications for interoperable, secure, identity-enabled Web services.

Members of the IETF SIPPING Working Group have published an updated draft defining SPIT authorization documents that use SAML. The problem of SPAM for Internet Telephony (SPIT) is an imminent challenge and only the combination of several techniques can provide a framework for dealing with unwanted communication. The responsibility for filtering or blocking calls can belong to different elements in the call flow and may depend on various factors.