Virtual ID card identifies 'Net users
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(InfoWorld) - Parents with children who love to chat on the Internet are familiar with the problem of how to keep their kids safe from online predators. NetIDme is a virtual ID card service designed to encourage children to check the identity of people they communicate with online in chat rooms and social networks or when exchanging instant messages. For each ID they check or issue, kids are awarded points, which they can exchange for music downloads and ring tones. The service is the brainchild of Alex Hewitt, a veteran in the online security industry, who saw a need to protect his own children -- and an opportunity to launch a new business. "I was particularly concerned about one of my daughters, who liked to chat and was receiving lots of messages from strangers," Hewitt said. "When I looked around for some technology to control this communication, I really couldn't find anything. I installed monitoring software but my daughter's chat friends didn't like that, and because I didn't want to restrict access altogether, I came up with the idea of developing a virtual ID card." The service, first tested in NetIDme Ltd.'s home base in Glasgow, is now available in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S., and will be rolled out at the start of next year in eight European countries. It costs Â£9.99 in the U.K. or $18.99 in the U.S. NetIDme requires both participants to be registered NetIDme users. To register, users sign up online and are sent a document, which they must complete and return. The document must be signed by the user and, if under 18 years of age, by a parent or guardian. It must also be signed by a professional person, including a teacher or doctor, to vouch for authenticity. The service is relatively easy to use. Say, a stranger approaches you in a chat room or by instant message. Before you chat, you ask the person to view his or her virtual ID card. To do this, you provide your NetIDme user name. Then the person who wants to chat with you logs in to the NetIDme Web site with name and password, clicks a tab to create a Net-ID and adds your user name. The system encrypts your name together with details from the new chat friend's account, logging a record of the new Net-ID. It then creates a hyperlink, which the new chat friend can paste directly into the chat window. When you click on the hyperlink, a browser window opens and takes you to the unlock screen on the NetIDme Web site. Only you can unlock the new chat friend's Net-ID by entering your e-mail, screen name and password. When you've finished entering this data, the friend's Net-ID card is instantly shown on the screen, displaying only the person's first name, age, gender and general location. A button on the screen allows you to repeat the process by sending your own hyperlink back to the new chat friend, displaying your details. The system automatically stores newly created IDs. NetIDme is not without its critics, however. Bloggers have attacked the service, claiming it falls short on security. "Contrary to what many bloggers claim, our site uses encryption technology, and we pay a security company a lot of money to make sure we are secure," Hewitt said in defense of the service. As for assurance against insider attacks, Hewitt points out that all NetIDme employees must consent to a police check, which includes police records and employment history. Also, at the request of police, the ID service has installed IP (Internet Protocol) tracking technology, which allows messages to be traced back to individual PCs. "Police asked us to have some sort of traceability in the event of abuse," he said. For parents concerned about the security of their kids on the Internet, NetIDme may not be the perfect solution, but the protection it offers is better than none.
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Hackers got into a database containing the Social Security numbers of
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Personal identity has taken on a new meaning in the digital age, where basic facts like your name, address or age are far less important to some people than the collected records of what you were looking at online.
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UPDATE: Yahoo user names and passwords can soon be used to access Web sites that support the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework.
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The always provocative Brad Templeton, who hung out with a large cadre of geeks at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW, or IIW2007) last week, has some cautions about new identity systems, even if they are all &quot;user-centric&quot;. These cautions lie in a paradox: &quot;The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.&quot; The italics are his.  Here he hits on the problem of market power asymmetries (vendors strong, customers weak) that have been with us for the whole Industrial Age, and are with us still. I think we have a way to overcome those, and that Brad's Paradox may provide exactly the conceptual hurdle we need to see before we can make progress. \
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Photocopying wallet information pays off.
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MICROSOFT has unveiled a new range of peripherals that include the company&#39;s first foray into biometric identification on the desktop.
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Interesting tidbit that was Slashdotted earlier - Netcraft has released an anti-phishing toolbar that leverages the enormous database of web sites the organization manages.
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After signatures, fingerprints and iris recognition, 3-D face maps encoded onto ID cards and passports are unveiled today. The ground-breaking system of recording biometric information could be the key to our security.
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A new computerized service enables customers to create phony outbound phone numbers in order to mask their telephone identities.
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Anti-phishing applications, smart cards, and new authentication technologies are vying for your support.
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New technology can trick a caller ID box into displaying the name and phone number of an entirely different person or company than the one actually calling.
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Ping Identity Corporation today announced that Version 2 of its consumer  authentication framework, PingLogin, is now available for download from  its Web site, www.pingidentity.com.
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TechWeb - New Secure Connector feature gives remote users secure network-level access, including access to business applications, data, and network services.
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On the Dotvoid.com blog today, there's a new post that shares some handy code to parse out information from the incoming user agent string for the visitors for your site.   Recently I experimented a bit with an Apache log file analyzer written in PHP. It's not all that difficult were it not for trying to parse the browser, or user agent, string. [...] For my purposes I don't care much for the operating system details. This is the result so far. I'm still not very satisfied but I thought maybe other people might be interested and maybe help out.   He provides the code in the format of an encapsulated PHP function that returns the product they're using, the version number of the browser and other various comments.
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Many 'contactless' credit cards can allow their owner's name and card number to be read at a distance.
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The personal details of thousands of mostly U.S.-based PC users have been discovered stashed on a server located in France, another indication of use of the Internet to collect personal data on a vast scale.