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!
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!