Month: April 2007

SOA approach to manage Identity

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18 April 2007

08:13

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You know I joined HP only 6 months ago and before that worked for Novell for 6 years. I have only in the last couple of weeks started to appreciate the beauty of HP’s identity offering. It is quite revolutionary as it is SOA integrated. This means that nothing is bolted on, e.g. workflow, RBAC, that the other traditional X.500 directory vendors are having to do today in order to meet the strong requirements for regulatory compliance. HP’s Select Identity is a Service Orientated architecture.

With many years experience with directories, I am a hardened X.500 expert, so was quite shocked when I first looked at the HP products for identity management. However, now I’ve got it! It is extremely cool. It reminds me of what Novell did about 15 years ago when they turned the ‘bindery’ login (NetWare) into a directory login (with NDS), was quite revolutionary at that time and didn’t take off to start with because people just didn’t get it. Of course once people did ‘get it’ other vendors jumped on the X.500 bandwagon too include MS with AD. Anyone wishing to dispute which was the first x.500 directory vendor on the market -maybe it was Sun with their LDAP directory?.. you are welcome to comment 😉

If you will be at InfoSec Europe next week be sure to visit the HP stand and ask them about their identity offering. You maybe surprised to find that HP has become such a key player in identity management over the last couple of years. That is why they employed me!

Privacy Seals ‘opt-in’ or ‘opt-out’

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14 April 2007

16:00

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Information Privacy

A privacy seal is an image that you display on your Web site that is granted by a privacy seal provider. It provides easily verifiable assurance to your customers that you care about their private information.

Take a look at this report from Forrester that does a comparison of different type of privacy seals available. Date of report is September 2006. It also includes privacy seals available concerning the use of children’s information.

Evolution – men pushing small children in pushchairs

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14 April 2007

08:30

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Out of the Box

There are many beautiful things about Stockholm, but one of the most beautiful apart from the 1000s of islands and Stockholm architecture, is the sight of fathers pushing babies and small children in pushchairs! In Stockholm you are just as, if not, more likely, to find men pushing pushchairs than women!

Some of this is because they have in Stockholm acted on the concept of ‘paternity leave’ which means that men have equality as a parent thus the choice to be equally involved in the upbringing of their children as the mothers, and many take ‘paternity leave’ from work. Many guys I know who have recently had children -there are many right now, seems to be some sort of ‘baby boom’ going on- are when on paternity leave meeting other fathers for coffee, and doing the things that mothers were traditionally doing. They even know which clothes their children are wearing that day and take them to nursery school when they return back to work again. I notice that mothers are more relaxed, having children is not a ‘life choice’, it is a normal, necessary and beautiful part of life.

So all you career women out there that have no time to have children due to the fact that you are living in an undeveloped society where people are still talking about the choice between career OR children, maybe you should move to Stockholm. Whatever has happened here seems to work!

ratemyteacher.co.uk available for pupils to rate their teachers online

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10 April 2007

08:57

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Sites such as ratemyteacher.co.uk and bebo give pupils the chance to anonymously praise or castigate their teachers from their own homes. Teachers are clearly disturbed by this development. I don’t know what to think, clearly this is something that happened before anyhow by ‘word-of-mouth’, now to have it digitally preserved could be quite damaging to a teacher’s career, and maybe not all allegations made by pupils are fair? I am not sure that I would like to be a teacher today.

News for gamers that are serious about their gaming systems!

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10 April 2007

08:27

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HP will focus on providing the technology that powers PC, online and mobile gaming, including infrastructure and workstations for gaming companies, content developers and service providers that participate in this demanding and rapidly growing market.

In September 2006, HP extended its reach into gaming with the acquisition of VoodooPC, an award-winning manufacturer of high-performance and personalized computer gaming systems. With the acquisition of VoodooPC, HP added the No. 1 premier lifestyle brand in gaming to its technology portfolio.

Britain the “Surveillence Society”!

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10 April 2007

07:42

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Did you know that Britain has by far the most cameras in the world – about one for every 12 people or approximately 5 million in public and private hands! Police and the Home Office are planning a significant upgrade of the CCTV network with new laws that would require camera operators to ensure that their equipment produces images good enough for police investigations. All spurred on by Government claims that it is needed to fight terrorism. I would like to see some evidence that supports the use of surveillance cameras is a price worth paying for the loss of personal privacy of the majority of the law-biding public. There must be more effective methods of achieving their goals for the ‘fight against terrorism’?

Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, said: “Surveillance in Britain has now reached a level equivalent to Russia and Malaysia. If something is not done soon to reverse this trend privacy will be extinct within a decade.”