End of Passwords From Vista!
Now, with Windows Vista, Gates feels he finally has the right weapons to supplant the password as a means of verifying who is who on computers and over the Internet.
The new operating system, due later this year, introduces a concept called InfoCards that gives users a better way to manage the plethora of Internet login names and passwords, as well as lets third parties help in the verification process.
"We're laying the foundation for what we need," Gates said in a speech at the RSA Conference 2006 here.
Even with the advancements, Gates said he wasn't naive enough to think the password would go away overnight.
"I don't pretend that we are going to move away from passwords overnight, but over three or four years, for corporate systems, this change can and should happen," he said.
Replacing passwords is part of Microsoft's endeavor to simplify security, which Gates said is dearly needed. "We have an overly complex system today," he said. Vista and Microsoft's upcoming security products, such as Windows OneCare Live and Microsoft Client Protection, will make life easier for consumers, he said.
Microsoft has described InfoCard as a technology that gives users a single place to manage various authentication and payment information, in the same way a wallet holds multiple credit cards.
InfoCard is Microsoft's second try at an authentication technology after its largely failed Passport single sign-on service, unveiled in 1999.
InfoCard attempts to address the complaint many critics had with Passport, which was that people's information was managed by Microsoft instead of by the users themselves and the businesses with which they dealt.
Although Microsoft has talked about InfoCard, and early versions of the InfoCard code were released to developers last year, Gates' speech marked one of the first times Microsoft has demonstrated publicly just how it might work.
In a presentation, Microsoft showed how a consumer could use a self-generated InfoCard to log in to a car rental site and then use a separate InfoCard from a membership group to get a discount on the rental.
posted by Parag Kalra @ 11:18 PM
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