Mashed Articles

SAML, WS-Security and the Secure Token Service of WS-Trust result in a very interesting mix, where federated identity and integration (web services) come together.
Microsoft has published the free book(let) “A Guide to Claims–based Identity and Access Control“. Obviously the book is focused on Microsoft technology, ADFS (code name Geneva), FAM and WIF in particular. But I found the first 2 chapters very informative and well written.

E.g. interesting to have confirmation that applications need to keep maintaining fine grained (data level) authorizations themselves.

Also intersting to read about the challenge of home realm discovery: how to know to what Identity provider an external user should be redirected to.

One of the main challenges in my opionion with federated identity is the transformation of tokens/claims. Unless there is further standardization (profiles), the integration with each external business partners will require token transformations. There seems to be a general tendency in WS-land not to bother too much with the actual business content of SOAP messages or SAML tokens.

The day when SAML tokens can be used in an interoperable manner to connect to back-end applications such as SAP or Oracle will be a great day. Looking forward to it.

Spoiler warning – two of my least favourite words in the English language, not including phlogiston and topiary. They remind me of those signs that soulless bureaucrats put up in their windows; the kind with ‘Polite Notice’ written on them in the hope that passers-by will be robotic enough to file the inevitable pettiness that follows into the desired brain receptacle. In both cases, the qualifier is added for one reason alone: that deep down, the person knows that in a fair and just world, what they’re writing would earn them a well-deserved slap in the kisser.

Then they write it anyway.

The problem with a spoiler warning is that, almost by definition, it’s an admission that you’re in a place where readers shouldn’t have to worry about them. If you actively hunt them out, of course, you’ll get no sympathy from me. I don’t care how exciting the show or game is, you make your click, you make your choice. What annoys me to the point of absolute spitting fury is having an experience randomly ruined. Once, long ago, when dragons roamed the Earth and 56.6k modems had only just been invented, enjoying the latest shows, movies, games and novels the way their creators intended was as easy as avoiding forums for a while, or making it clear that any friends incapable of keeping their mouths shut would be having themselves a hot date with the business end of a blunt needle and length of black thread. Now, however, there’s always something exciting on the way, and avoiding unwanted info is next to impossible. The statute of limitations for spoilers seems to be roughly five picoseconds, especially for net-friendly shows like Lost. With Twitter, events can be spoiled in real-time.

Or faster, if The Pirate Bay’s minions are on the ball.

It doesn’t take much, and usually the guilty party isn’t even aware they’re doing it. They think that by writing ‘Spoiler Warning’ they’re doing their duty, oblivious to the fact that the eye doesn’t magically blank out everything except the currently focused word. Yes, the warning’s there, but like finding the words ‘Do not drink’ at the bottom of what turns out to be a tall glass of cool urine on a hot summer day, you’re still left with a foul taste in your mouth.

Personally speaking, when I’m looking forward to something, I like to go in knowing as little as possible. Something that sounds terrible in summary can work brilliantly when you have all the facts, and simply not knowing what to expect adds that all-important Christmas Eve excitement to getting your hands on something new. True, sometimes I crack; sometimes the nature of my job makes it impossible to know as little as I want to about what’s coming up over the next few months. But all things considered, ignorance is usually bliss. Last month, for instance, I dodged the spoiler gauntlet for both Mass Effect 2 and BioShock 2. The worlds, reveals, plot points, mechanics… all of them unfolded at the pace the creators intended. It wasn’t easy, but holding out was worth the effort.

What’s ironic is that it’s rarely the good bits that get directly spoiled. If someone really loves a twist, chances are they’ll hide it so everyone else has the same moment of realisation or discovery. True, you might find out that there’s a That Bit in the game/show/movie, or that (to borrow an IT Crowd line) There’s A Twist, but generally nothing specific, and nothing that ruins the experience. It’s when someone’s disappointed that you tend to get the dismissive, back-handed ‘Spoiler Warning: I was so cross when I found out it was Earth’ level variety.

These are spoilers in the purest sense – not just ruining the moment, but poisoning the whole experience. Even if it turns out to be great, that old saying about only having one chance to make a first impression is every bit as true for media as people. And of course, with people, you don’t have to spend up to £50 a shot to talk to them.

Not most people, anyway.

Until we have a magic helmet capable of zapping very specific memories, or some form of trebuchet-based justice system for dealing with persistent spoiler offenders, there’s really nothing that can be done about all this. If the occasional big release means becoming a temporary online hermit, so be it.

Still, I would politely urge that the next time you’re about to wax lyrical, check you’re in a spoiler-friendly place, and if not, don’t say anything you wouldn’t have wanted to read in advance yourself. The people you’re talking to have a right to enjoy things at the same pace. They may also have knives. Just a thought.

With 2009 now over, our eyes must inevitably turn to 2010. In Arthur C Clarke’s famous novel, this was the year when the Russians and Americans teamed up on a universe-redefining mission to uncover the secrets of reality. In the real world, there’ll probably be a slightly faster iPhone.

All things considered, we’ll call it a draw.

But what else can we expect? We’ve dug out the crystal ball (in the knowledge that nobody ever, ever bothers looking back at futurologists’ old work) to bring you this exclusive preview of the months to come. It’s science!

January: Windows 8 is released, several years ahead of schedule. New features include an updated title screen, three new pieces of wallpaper, and a version of Minesweeper with the xyzzy cheat code back in. Apple counters by releasing a blank CD as the next version of OS X, describing it as ‘the atom bomb in our war against bloat’.

February: Rupert Murdoch gives up on the internet in disgust, citing widespread piracy and the impossibility of selling content online as the main reasons. As one final act of revenge, he releases the world’s first hard copy of the web. ‘Taste of your own bloody medicine,’ he tells the pirate community, which immediately sets about scanning it in for the torrent sites.

March: Declining advertising revenues finally force change on web services. Around the world, former online millionaires are seen holding desperate cardboard signs reading ‘Will Host Photos For Food’.

April: Google launches Chrome OS, a Linux-based operating system designed to capitalise on what’s left of the web economy. Users aren’t entirely blown away by it, citing its limited features and the inherent benefits of downloadable software over online JavaScript applications, especially in the face of May’s zombie apocalypse.

June: With May officially declared The Month We Never Speak Of Again, the world returns to the important stuff: the brand-new iPhone. New features include a diamond screen to prevent scratching, an updated maps application that tells you where you’re going before you’ve even decided, and an FM tuner. Worried that the market might be getting oversaturated, Steve Jobs only permits one to be built. Apple fanboys happily queue up for the chance to buy a photograph of him using it.

July: Hollywood finally closes the infamous ‘analogue hole’. Previous attempts at foiling ‘if you can see it, you can copy it’ are declared to have failed due to aiming at the wrong half of the sentence, leading to giant sound-dampening, picture ruining metal barriers being constructed in front of every cinema screen. Viewers comment that while this does detract from the experience, it’s still better than Transformers 2. Pirates continue to rip Oscar screener DVDs like before.

August: First conviction for Skype Rage upheld. The judge says that while he appreciates the frustration new college student Phillip Carmichael built up after listening to his parents saying ‘Can you hear me? Is this coming through?’ for two hours, actually jumping into a car, driving seven hours across the country and murdering them as they continued parroting the question into their cheap microphone was a little too much.

September: Intel fights back against AMD’s latest so-small-you-can-only-see-it-under-a-microscope chip by building one so small, you can’t even do that. At least, that’s what it claims.

October: Scandal rages through the graphics industry as the world’s first completely digital actor turns out to be merely be a deeply unconvincing human. With his plastic skin, dead eyes and no trace of personality, mournful meat marionette Virtual Actor-One confesses that he thought officially changing his name would be the best way of finding work in an increasingly tech-focused Hollywood. Actor-One’s past roles include the third guard on the right in Tron and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.

November: Scientists at CERN finally manage to create the elusive ‘god particle’ in the Large Hadron Collider. Fighting promptly breaks out over what it should be called, how it should be studied and how technicians should dress to do so. Luckily, the community soon finds a way to settle the various issues to everyone’s satisfaction. “If only we’d had Halo 3 Deathmatch during the Crusades,” sighs the Pope.

December: Bill Gates announces the discovery of clinical immortality. Everyone under the age of 55 is eligible and anyone can afford it, until someone finally reads the EULA in detail and discovers that the yearly licence renewal fee for their existence is based on an exponential scale. On the plus side, the slave collars are really very fetching.