Re: [Auth]Re: [CoreTeam]IDsec meeting

[Hans Zandbelt]

Mario,

At 07:53 11/29/2001 -0800, Mario D. Santana wrote:
>IDSec sounds a lot like Albert Scherbinsky's Flysolo project. There are
>sources and other info at http://sf.net/projects/flysolo -- I also have a
>very rough mozilla plugin client implemented based on those.

I'm not able to find any documentation on Flysolo now but I recall
that it focusses on single-login by extending webpages with some
extra instructions. The scope of Virtual Identities and IDsec is
broader.

The API that Content Providers will use for accessing the user
profile data, once transferred to them by means of IDsec, was recognized
as an important area of interest in our IDsec meeting yesterday.
We identified that a C-library for accessing profile information should
be developed that can be wrapped by multiple systems such as PHP, Tcl,
an Apache module and possibly an HTML/embed/javascript tag as well.
(Currently the IDsec prototype implementation uses a server-side proxy
written in Java to access the profile via Java code).

Near as I can tell, the basic difference is that Flysolo's data is
>fetched from repositories and fed to web services by the _client_.
>Compared to IDSec, Flysolo is more dependent on client software and less
>portable to arbitrary kiosks and such. One can imagine some sort of proxy
>that adds Flysolo client functions while browsing, but for now it's just
>that: imagining. However, it requires very few changes to Flysolo-enable
>a website compared to IDSec.

In fact the IDsec functionality at the client side is implemented by
a proxy in the current system. We chose not to transfer all profile information
with the client HTTP request because typically it will be stored somewhere
on the Internet with a Profile Provider. It makes more sense to fetch it from
there directly. This does not prevent you from being your own Profile Provider
though.

Thanks for your remarks. I would like to encourage your and other people as
well to extend the draft functionality of IDsec with the good ideas that exist
in/emerge from other projects!

Thanks,

Hans.


------------------------------------------------------------
Hans Zandbelt                         address@hidden 
Telematica Instituut                     http://www.telin.nl 
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