I spent a lot of time today at the Wilshire Grand today at the Fall 2002 Internet2 Member Meeting (USC is the host). The middleware presentations were fairly interesting. In one of the presentations, a short Shibboleth presentation was given. Shibboleth is basically a federated web-based authentication/authorization type middleware (think digital identity [but immediately useful, at least for education settings], role/attribute type stuff). It’s actually mostly running now, with the first beta coming out next week and a 1.0 scheduled for around December. I like the [More digital identity: Digital Identity Weblog, Digital ID World, OpenSAML).
More thoughts as I go through documents. The stuff I’m working on with developing some sort of intra-campus authentication/auth doesn’t directly map with the Shib stuff, but it’s still pretty relevant (and the rest of the middleware track of course). One interesting thing is that WebCT apparently implemented Shib support in a couple weeks (treating it as a portal). One interesting thing I noticed from the demo was that the Brown WebCT has a module for a ‘CLASS blog’ running MT. Weird and wacky.
[Will try to add some more links and stuff to this entry when I gather some thoughts / go through my notes]
One weird thing was that there was wi-fi set up, but it kept flapping up and down (and making it unusable). Very strange.