I hope James Governor, Mary Branscombe, and Kim Cameron will triangulate on this, but here’s my report on a cosmically funny incident at a party last night. I walked up to James just as he witnessed Kim being forcibly denied access to the venue. He lacked the necessary identity token — a plastic wristband — and couldn’t talk his way in.
If you don’t know who Kim is, what’s cosmically funny here is that he’s the architect for Microsoft’s identity system and one of the planet’s leading authorities on identity tokens and access control.
We stood around for a while, laughing and wondering if Kim would reappear or just call it a night. Then he emerged from the elevator, wearing a wristband which — wait for it — belonged to John Fontana.
Kim hacked his way into the party with a forged credential! You can’t make this stuff up!
October 30, 2008 at 1:14 pm
[...] It happened like this. I was talking to Mary Branscombe, Simon Bisson and John Udell when suddenly Mary jumped up with a big smile on her face. Kim, who has a kind of friendly bear look about him, had arrived. She ran over and then I noticed that a bouncer had his arm across Kim’s chest (”if your name’s not down you’re not coming in”). Kim had apparently wandered upstairs without getting his wristband first. Kim disappeared off downstairs, and I figured he might not even come back. A few minutes later though and there he was. I assumed he had found an organizer downstairs to give him a wristband… When he said that he actually had taken the wristband from someone leaving the party, and hooked it onto his wrist me and John practically pissed our pants laughing. As Jon explains (in Kim Cameron’s Excellent Adventure): [...]
November 1, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I jumped up because I saw Kim and when I waved at him, he waved at me – rather more urgently. I attempted to act as a token exchange system by requesting two PRs and an internal Microsoft chap to authenticate the applying party, but the system was designed only for anonymous authorisation and Kim had timed out before I got to an authoritative directory owner. I’m sure Kim said John Fontana’s token too, but we had forced two martinis into his hands by this point and he might have been forging his logs…
what’s even funnier is that there was a party in the same place on Saturday night and we had come in through a system back door (the lift to the hotel rooms, a helpful employee, the catering stairs – social engineering?) and had been rejected – though in a friendlier way – and had to reload the process by entering the site through the front door. The macaroni cheese balls are to die for, but oh, the interface…
great to meet you in person by the way!