The Seattle Times has an article about how Microsoft is pushing Passport as a national ID system for interacting with the US Federal Government.
The National ID card may or may not come to pass, but Microsoft is pushing to get Passport adopted for a single-signon solution for citizens to interact with the Federal Government online. This online passport may not get you into a bar, but would let you keep your preferences when bouncing between portal to government portal (and would let agencies like the IRS, Dept. of Veterans Affairs, etc. know they were dealing with you).
This is such a bad idea on so many levels it's not funny.
It's especially gauling is that Microsoft is proposing this while the antitrust negotiations are ongoing.
Furthermore, all Microsoft is proposing is a single-signon technology. There's nothing proprietary required to get single-signon implemented (the US Navy has already developed fleet-wide systems that use Kerberos and LDAP). Nor is there anything proven that Passport can scale to 300 Million single-signon users. (Estimates are that roughly 2% of Passport users are using Passport for single-signon; all of the others seem to be using it "because Microsoft told them to" in order to use Hotmail, et. al.)
It's especially gauling is that Microsoft is proposing this while the antitrust negotiations are ongoing.
Or even galling. But all Gaul is divided into three parts, and part 2 is that Microsoft thinks that now is the appropriate moment to begin extorting money from the public schools of Oregon and Washington State. Not sure where part 3 is yet.
Apparently they've decided that public opinion just doesn't matter.
It could be a good thing for open source.
