Surprise: Passport Isn't What We Were Told. Microsoft and the FTC announced last week that Microsoft has agreed to settle FTC charges related to "the privacy and security of personal information collected from consumers through its 'Passport' web services."

According to the Commission's complaint, Microsoft falsely represented that:

• It employs reasonable and appropriate measures under the circumstances to maintain and protect the privacy and confidentiality of consumers' personal information collected through its Passport and Passport Wallet services, including credit card numbers and billing information stored in Passport Wallet;
• Purchases made with Passport Wallet are generally safer or more secure than purchases made at the same site without Passport Wallet when, in fact, most consumers received identical security at those sites regardless of whether they used Passport Wallet to complete their transactions;
• Passport did not collect any personally identifiable information other than that described in its privacy policy when, in fact, Passport collected and held, for a limited time, a personally identifiable sign-in history for each user; and
• The Kids Passport program provided parents control over what information participating Web sites could collect from their children.

Now the Hard Part. Eric Knorr (ZDnet) points out that the easy part of the web-services stack (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) is nearly complete, but the upper layers (authentication, business processes, security) are in turmoil.
Posted Wednesday, August 07, 2002 8:32:07 AM 

Summer Reading. I finally had a chance to catch up on some of the backlog of web-services articles and papers on my desk. Here's a list of some of the goodies I found in the stack:

• Intermediaries. A whitepaper from Primordial that suggests vertical hubs will replace the current crop of horizontal web-services network vendors.
• Transactions. A thorough review of the technical issues surrounding transactions under web services. Why ACID won't work, and an intro to the Business Transaction Protocol (BTP).
• Break on Through. John Hagel and John Seely Brown's CEO's Guide to the New IT Strategy. Companies will soon buy their information technologies as services provided over the Internet rather than own and maintain their own hardware and software. (This is a superb 23-page PDF, which I assume portends Hagel's next book. Too many good quotes to list here.)
• Where Will Web Services Be Deployed? More good Hagel. Don't forget Part Two. "Early adoption is proceeding along two parallel tracks. On one track, IT organizations are launching experiments with the implementation of Web services technology...The second track consists of business line executives facing real, near-term business issues - most commonly, these days, how to get more operating (expense and asset) savings quickly."
• Why SSL Doesn't Cut It. SSL secures the connection, not the message. It's also bound to HTTP. [Source: Julian Bond]
• Specs Unite Partners. "Together, WSCI (Web Services Choreography Interface) and BPML (Business Process Modeling Language), introduced late last month, should provide business analysts and software engineers with a view of how business processes perform in various business-to-business scenarios." Also discusses IBM's Web Services Flow Language (WSFL) and Microsoft's XLANG. [Source: eWeek]
• The Role of Web Services in the Financial Services Industry. Gartner G2. Interesting for all, considering that financial services tend to lead in such technologies. [Source: Scott Loftesness, Glenbrook Partners]

RosettaNet and UCC Merge. RosettaNet will become a subsidiary of the UCC. The pair will develop a large database of common objects that can be used as building blocks for business processes. The UCC currently works within 23 industries with an emphasis on retail and grocery. RosettaNet focuses on the high technology sector, and specifically on companies representing electronic components, information technology and semiconductor manufacturing.
Posted Monday, August 05, 2002 12:52:44 PM   

Web Services Scope. The latest issue of the always-interesting analysis memo from The Stencil Group. Topics include Web Services and CRM Converge, Mercy Street (earnings announcements from enterprise software vendors), and Startup Spotlight: Blue Titan Software.
Posted Thursday, August 01, 2002 7:42:34 PM 

Reality Check. Craig Donato, President and CEO, Grand Central, has joined my panel at Internet World in New York on October 2, entitled Web Services Reality Check: A Roundtable Discussion. Other participants so far are Annrai O'Toole, Executive Chairman, Cape Clear, and Patrick Grady, CEO, Talaris. Should be interesting. To bad we only get 1:15. I'm sure we could talk all day.
Posted Wednesday, July 31, 2002 5:06:31 PM

The Hosting Idiot Savant Syndrome. Ever wonder how vendors can be absolutely brilliant in one area, and yet remarkably incompetent in others? Here's my latest column in Internet World.
Posted Monday, August 12, 2002 2:18:42 PM  

In the News. The widespread problems continue to spread throughout the hosting industry. In the past week:

• Digex Cuts 20% of Staff. The stock closed Monday below $0.16 per share. $10.3 million market cap.
• Level 3's Debt Downgraded. The investment by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway wasn't enough to keep the S&P rating up. But they've still got a market cap of $2.225 billion, even with losses of $2.83 per share.
• Qwest to Close Two-Thirds of It's Data Centers. 11-12 out of 17 colocation facilities will be shut down. $1.88 billion valuation, $1.12 per share, with a loss of $0.41 per share.
• WorldCom: It Gets Even Worse. The company said Thursday that it had uncovered another $3.3 billion in fraudulent accounting, adding to the $3.85 billion fraud it revealed in June.

Intermedia/Digex Network Down. At 5:00 GMT Matrix monitoring locations detected a complete shutdown of the Intermedia/Digex Network. All devices monitored reported 100% packet loss. At 11:15 GMT Intermedia/Digex began restoring devices and by 12:00 GMT they had 20% of their network back up. At 14:00 GMT, Intermedia/Digex still has about 69% of their network down and they are slowly making progress to restore connectivity. Intermedia/Digex informed Matrix that they had a master ticket open and that there was no current ETA for restoring all connections.
Posted Wednesday, August 07, 2002 1:03:55 PM 

HostingTech. This month's issue, as usual, has a number of excellent articles including the Armchair Quarterback's question, Is the [Loudcloud] Opsware launch the last nail in the MSP coffin?. Also, coordinated article by Max Smetannikov and review by Kevin Self of the three leading vendors of server-virtualization software packages: Ensim, Plesk and Sphera.

The bad news is that HostingTech doesn't publish articles from their most-recent issue on line. The good news is that hard-copy subscriptions are free.
Posted Monday, August 12, 2002 2:43:47 PM  

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