Unisys announced that it has acquired Identity Management services company ePresence, Inc. Unisys indicated that ePresence was acquired for $11.5 million cash and excludes ePresence's interest in online yellow pages provider Switchboard, Inc.

"This strategic acquisition furthers Unisys drive to become the premier provider of enterprise security solutions while positioning us for market leadership in identity management," said Janet B. Wallace, president, Unisys Global Infrastructure Services and the company's lead executive for security solutions.

Even though Digital ID World is officially beginning this evening, the events are already fully underway. One such event is the Liberty Alliance meeting, and one piece of news to come out of that meeting is highlighted by this article.

The article speaks about the combination of the Liberty specification with the technology that exists in Europe with the Radicchio organization.

Surely, this is just the beginning of news to erupt at DIDW...

A security breach at Valve Software caused the loss of the code for the company's hot new computer game, and their game distribution system. It may also have caused the loss of software the company has licensed from other companies. You can hear the sense of violation and disbelief in this email from Valve's Managing Director to his community. Unfortunately, you will see many more emails like this one in the coming years.

This type of incident indicates why identity based enterprise rights management techniques will gain traction (Microsoft's Rights Management server is an early example.) The amount of economic value that exists primarily as trade secrets is immense, and without identity based rights management the Internet threatens the ability to protect it from theft. Many companies still deal with this issue by not connecting key systems to the Internet, but that strategy is not sustainable much longer. When there are high value assets, break-ins can never be fully prevented. Only a good, well integrated, and user friendly identity based rights management structure will ultimately prevent the long term leakage of such information into the public domain.

Rights Managment is about far more than music piracy. It isn't even mostly about software theft as in this example either. The manufacturing process secrets of what are traditionally thought of as uninteresting companies are worth many billions, as just one example. And the "intelligence value" of business negotiations in progress can be massively high.

Long term, business will not tolerate the information sieve that is the Internet as we know it today. But as they come to understand the problems, it is also important to learn enough to avoid reactive wrong turns that only make things worse.

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has published a position paper on trusted computing and specifically Microsoft's NGSCB. This technology has caused alarm among privacy advocates since its inception, and in this paper the EFF has decided how to position themselves on it.

In short, they want the technology to certify a lie, otherwise they don't like it. The white paper arrives at and advocates this totally political position in a very studious manner (and outlines the technology itself honestly and quite well in the process.) In a News.com report the EFF's Seth Schoen was quite direct about it, however, "Only the ability to lie to remote software or a content owner will allow the PC user's rights to be protected."

It should be obvious that this is not a long term tenable position, as it removes the point of trusted computing technology - you can't trust liars after all. I feel sure the EFF knows that, and that this position is an attempt to defeat the technology by appearing to embrace it with one little caveat that defeats it - again a political tactic.

Imagine if your reaction to having to provide the bank financial info to get a mortgage was to demand the right to lie about your credit to the bank, and for the bank to be forced to accept your lie as fact. Your reason would be the same, after all the bank might lock you out of the loan market if they knew the truth!

It appears that it will take some time for people to see (and accept) the distinction that in a networked transaction the owner of the client computer isn't the only one with rights in the transaction. Only then can an honest discussion begin about how those rights are apportioned when they come into conflict.

Sun and SchlumbergerSema are partnering to offer utility computing capabilities to customers in the energy, finance, public sector and telecommunications industries.

Included in the Sun-SchlumbergerSema offering is federated security via Java Card identity badge and access to Sun support services.

The Verisign SiteFinder battle continues with ICANN scheduling a "fact-gathering meeting" for Oct. 7 in Washington, D.C. "VeriSign introduced its wild card service, and although I am told there was some kind of advance notice, it came upon the world as a surprise and after some hours it became clear that it is a pretty big deal," said Steve Crocker, chairman of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee. "The preliminary evidence suggests Site Finder has impacted the stability of the Internet."