There have been some very significant developments in the Information Card arena in the last little while — have you noticed?

• MS has support in their next-gen CardSpace client for non-SSL Information Card transactions
  • This completely removes the financial barrier to entry for this technology, by removing both the cost of a certificate and a static IP address for low-assurance transactions.
  • We now theoretically will have three different assurance levels going, based on three different ssl certificate levels (no certs, regular certs, and HA certs).
• I’m not sure if you’ve all noticed the excellent work that Axel Nennker is doing over at the openInfocard project, but if you haven’t bookmarked his blog Ignis Vulpis, you are missing out on some great technical entries, and documentation of very necessary work.
  • He’s made huge strides with the Firefox Selector (in conjunction with team members like Chuck and Ian)
  • He just updated Kevin Millar’s Firefox plugin
  • He will be participating in person at the Interop in Barcelona
  • Not sure if I can mention how cool and forward-thinking his employer is, but I’m going to anyway :)
• I haven’t really said anything about digitalMe yet – I could say a lot, or just say wow.
  • I love the name. It has everything I ever wanted in a name. It is easily searchable. It is memorable. It is evocative. It is singular. The more I use that term, the more I like using the term. It has the capability of becoming as much of a household name as CardSpace does — a worthy match. I can’t tell you how impressed I am that this name has been put to such a good use, and I can’t tell you how happy I am not to have to talk about a horrible, forgettable acronym with no sex appeal or stickiness when I demonstrate that Information Cards can run on my Mac regardless of which OS I happen to prefer at any given moment. It is a gift horse, and as someone who throws these terms around a lot, I am extremely happy to embrace it and watch it take new life.
  • I love the Macintosh ease of installation. I’d love to just be able to trigger digitalMe from Kevin Millar’s Firefox plugin one day. Kudos to Andy Hodgkinson at Bandit — another name to watch.

What haven’t we seen that I would like to see?

• Agreement on a JavaScript standard for detecting the presence of an Identity Selector
• Cohesive recommendations from OSIS regarding grey areas in the current Infocard protocol specifications (I hope this will come from our Interop work)
• A fix for that damned CardSpace bug where there is no persistence in a user’s choice to send optional claims to a given RP.
• A better way to specify issuers.
• A few other missing things that I intend to rant about soon.

So much work done. So much work to do. It makes my geek-girl heart beat faster, just to think of it all ;)  Ain’t life grand?