Upon my final deprovisioning...

With all the Olympic torches passing through San Francisco, advanced cryptography going on here at RSA, code flying around everywhere, XACML interoperability explosions and cooled RAM attacks there is considerable worry and concern about the collateral damage to us civilians who are attending the expo.

RSA has taken that into consideration and joined the green movement as seen in the photo here. While I appreciate their efforts I'm not too sure who will deposit my badge holder and lanyard if I do make my final departure while on the show floor.

Perhaps there's an identity management vendor out there that can take care of this problem for me? Which vendors take care of final deprovisionings?

Technorati Tags:
identity management, RSA

Excuse me, but is that liquid nitrogen in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I'm at RSA and one of the things I'm doing is visiting various booths, talking to customers, etc. I'll be posting about a number of things over the next few days but when I saw this I started to laugh...

The background for this is the "cooled RAM attack" which you may have read about:

The new attacks exploit the fact that information stored in a computer’s temporary working memory, or RAM, does not disappear immediately when a computer is shut off or when the memory chip is taken from the machine, as is commonly thought. Under normal circumstances, the data gradually decays over a period of several seconds to a minute. The process can be slowed considerably using simple techniques to cool the chips to low temperatures.

Fortunately, the folks from SecureDoc and Seagate have solved this problem through software. I solved it without spending a nickel with the additional benefit of increasing both my physical fitness and cardiovascular system:

If I happen to see someone coming at me (or my laptop), towing a vat of liquid nitrogen I run away, quickly.

If there was an award for the stupidest marketing campaign I'd nominate this one.

Technorati Tags:
SecureDoc, Seagate

Hitachi buys majority of M-Tech

Update: I'm at RSA and managed to bump into Idan Shoham who is M-Tech's CTO. He confirmed that he already likes sushi and that he was flying to Tokyo at the end of the week. All is well from his perspective.

Consolidation continues!!! Just forwarded to me from one our guys in our APAC division. Original article is on "ARN".

Looking to expand its line of identity management products, Hitachi has bought a majority ownership interest in M-Tech Information Technology, a vendor of password management software.

Hitachi already sells authentication products that identify the patterns of the veins in a person's finger to confirm the user's identity. The company expects that the M-Tech products will help expand this product line by giving the company new software to help manage functions on the back end.

So, what does this mean? Bye-bye M-Tech. My friends up in Calgary are going to be busy integrating with Hitachi's "finger-vein authentication system" which, according to the article, "is used by about 80 percent of the Japanese financial institutions". I hope you guys like sushi.

If I were an M-Tech customer I'd be worried. Also, why buy a majority of M-Tech but not all of it?? That seems weird but I'm no financial rocket scientist.

Unfortunately, I don't associate Hitachi with identity management. Maybe this is a big area for Hitachi in Japan but what about the rest of the world?

Technorati Tags:
identity management, M-Tech

Windows Server 2008 Launch in Seattle

I had the opportunity to speak at the Windows Server 2008 launch today here in Seattle. Ted Kummert who is the Corporate Vice-President for the data and storage group was the executive speaker for the keynote. I was asked to speak about the products that Quest Software has that support Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and about our partnership with Microsoft.

It all went off without a hitch but guess which technology I spoke most highly of...

Active Directory?? Nope.

Identity Management?? Nope.

SQL Server?? Nope.

POWERSHELL!!!

I really do believe that PowerShell is revolutionary compared to everything else that's "new" in Windows Server 2008. If you haven't checked out our free PowerShell GUI and cmdlets then now is the time: http://www.powergui.org/

Technorati Tags:
Microsoft, Active Directory, PowerGUI, PowerShell, Quest Software