And there was a time when a Request For Comments was intended to be an informal note, we seem to have made a mess there as well. What I find sad about the whole identity/authentication area is the way that we have so many frameworks and frameworks of frameworks and complexity for what is a very simple problem. And I am sorry, but doing the job the user wants done IS actually the easy part. What is hard about federated authentication is the fact that there are all these people who already think they have done something important and that it must be part of the solution. The result is a series of Frankenstein monsters with very visible seams with irrelevant choices the user is presented with. My computer knows I am logged into my Google mail account to write this note. Why can't it figure out a seamless and entirely transparent method of securely communicating that fact to other sites I might want to access? That is not a hard problem, but it has been made hard by insistence on irrelevant technology. Last time we had a BOF on that subject matter we had people with the bizarre notion that the user interface should be excluded from work on user authentication.I don't care if usability is outside people's comfort zone, if any group is going to be chartered in this space it should be required to address usability issues or we are better off without it. On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 7:57 PM, Melinda Shore <shore@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mar 9, 2010, at 3:51 PM, Glen Zorn wrote: >> >> Suddenly I'm nostalgic for the days when bar BOFs were impromptu affairs >> that sprang up in, well, _bars_ & were of necessity free of PowerPoint >> infestation... > > It wasn't that long ago that a member of the IESG was > objecting to calling them BOFs at all. It used to be > the case that it was just a bunch of people talking, > and this stuff about rooms and presentations and whatnot > leads me to wonder if the "bar BOF" has graduated to > something that's got some level of sponsorship or > support from somewhere other than just the people who > show up, and whether or not that matters. > > Melinda > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf