Shares of Google rose to an all-time new high today onpositive analyst comments and an uptick in trading for major internet companies. The company's shares rose $9.02 to $534.02 and now has a market cap of $163.6bn. Google is certainly a major force in the market, if you were to compare market cap across the major tech vendors it ranks only behind Microsoft and is ahead of IBM, Intel, Oracle and SAP.    read more »

The Department of Homeland Security posted its guidelines for the implementation of Real ID. Real ID is a set of standards for drivers licences and state ID cards proposed by the Federal Government that:  read more »

AOL's recent move to embrace OpenID (right behind Microsoft and the rest of world+dog) has taken the next step, with all AOL and AIM screen names becoming an OpenID URL.

With this, in one fell swoop, over 63 million new OpenID accounts have just been created.  read more »

Ma.gnolia.com, a popular social bookmarking site, added OpenID as an alternative method for new user registration in December, 2006. OpenID is a decentralized user-centric identity architecture that allows a user to use a URL based ID (think of it like a username) to log into a variety of websites.

Earlier this month, Larry Halff, founder of Gnolia Systems shared usage statistics of 5467 users that registered for new service between December 15 and January 31. No specific user data was provided.

Sample Sizing:  read more »

OpenID, the most visible of the new identity management schemas - and CardSpace, Microsoft's browser based initiative to help users control and protect their identity online have decided to play nicely together in the User-Centric Identity space. The press release is here .

A team consisting of Microsoft, VeriSign, Sxip and JanRain has been assembled to implement the new interoperability model.  read more »

Did you know that Time magazine has made "YOU" their Person of the Year 2006?
We’ve now entered the era where the web is providing previously unseen capabilities to the masses. The result is a myriad of new communication and information service providers and hundreds of new logins and passwords.

The growth of these silos of ‘Unmovable Identity Data’ (e.g.: usernames and passwords accounts locked into vendor silos) is being replaced with a new breed of identity-centric technologies now being called Identity 2.0.  read more »

Multiple sources are reporting that the Maine legislature has passed a resolution to opt-out of the federally mandated REAL ID program.  read more »

This morning, Brian Muller announced the release of a modfile that adds OpenID to Apache as an available method for authenticating a server session.

The module allows for OpenID Provider white and blacklisting (critical for enterprises looking to allow only allow trusted OpenID Providers to provide identity claims).

More information can be found on the project website.

On January 11, Government Security (a magazine and online site that promotes technology for the "protection of the homeland") published a piece entitled Majority of Americans support biometrics in IDs.

The results were interesting, if not necessarily groundbreaking.  read more »

Recently, Paul Madsen posted a small comment regarding the OpenID plugin for MediaWiki.

The plugin, as it has been created, gives the ability for Relying Parties (in this case, the MediaWiki sites) to build OpenID whitelists and blacklists. For example, the Relying Party could choose to only accept OpenID identity URLs from idp.myvauthid.com, or choose to reject all OpenID identity URLs from Livejournal.  read more »