The New York Times’, Denise Caruso, has written an insightful piece,Securing Very Important Data: Your Own – New York Times, on the proliferation of online identifies and efforts ( or lack of ) by Web 2.0 technologies to protect that data.

As long as we are willing to relinquish some personal data, Web applications have long allowed us to create virtual identities that can conduct most of the social and financial transactions that typify life in the real world.

As a tech geek I have been at the fore using a lot of these applications to live my online life with easy. However this ease of use does come with an increased risk of fraud and potential misuse of data and the publics trust.

But the newest generation of these services is starting to collect and store far more than just the standard suite of identity data — name and address, phone, Social Security or credit-card numbers — that populates the databases of banks and credit-card processors. They increasingly store information, generated by us, that is directly linked to those virtual identities.

I have often worried about this. Not so much that it keeps me up at night but enough that I routinely review the privacy and usage policies of these sites. I have to trust that the companies will do what they said they would. I believe that these companies have a lot to use if they misuse any information provided by the customer. It has taken people a long time to even consider moving their lives (mostly electronic banking and shopping ) online and news of any kind of impropriety would spread like wildfire on the ‘Net.

One site that I have been excited about lately is Mint.

In exchange for customers uploading their account information and allowing sponsors to offer them specialized services, Mint will connect nightly to their credit-card providers, banks and credit unions. Then it automatically updates transactions and accounts, balances their checkbooks, categorizes their transactions, compares cash with debt and, based on their personal spending habits, shops for better rates on new accounts and credit cards.

Wow! Now that is what I had expected from Quicken. Quicken stopped being useful to me a few years ago. Despite having hooks into all the major banks for electronic download and submittal of transactions I found myself asking “where’s the value in this?”. Yes, I can graph my net-worth and spending trends but I wanted deeper analysis and I wanted to take a look at my financial picture at any time. Not just when I was on the one computer with and installed copy of Quicken.

However, these online services do collect a significant amount of personal data and with all the linking and connecting etc. there is a real risk that a compromise in one service and lead to failure in another.

As a result, some security experts are starting to ask whether the “identity data-for-services” business model, which is the engine for virtually all e-commerce companies, is a fair trade — not just for consumers, but for business as well.

Security researchers and professionals are working on ways to facilitate collaboration and transactions without the need for extensive data sharing.

To this end, Mr. Neuenschwander and his colleagues have floated the intriguing concept of the L.L.P.: the Limited Liability Persona. This persona would be a legally recognized virtual person in which users could “invest” the financial or identity resources of their choosing.

But if a company loses or tampers with an L.L.P’s data, “the law allows me to sue them because it’s corporate information,” Mr. Neuenschwander said. “It’s digital-rights management,” he added, referring to the access control technologies used by publishers and other copyright holders to limit use of digital media, “only you’re acting on behalf of your own organization.”

Sound like the idea is to extend the concept of the corporation ( a Limited Liability Corporation or LLC ) to the individual. Sounds like a great idea. Corporations sometime seem to enjoy more rights that private citizens and this may be one way to deal with them on somewhat even footing. Do I get the tax breaks as well?

(Via The New York Times.)

Like most technology people I know, I have multiple Instant Messenger (IM) accounts because not all the people I chat with use the same provider. My personal favourite is Google Talk because I like simple interfaces, open platforms and Larry Page is a University of Michigan alumnus (Go Blue!).

But most of my family and friends have settled on either one of MSN, AOL, or Yahoo. At first I downloaded each of the client applications but tired of installing and launching multiple IM clients each with a unique interface. I wanted one protocol to bind them and one client to rule them all. I discovered the wonderful world of multi-protocol instant messaging clients like GAIM.

“Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr networks.” — GAIM web site

Wow, I thought. That sounds awesome! Yes. It it. I downloaded GAIM and several plug-ins and for a while I was quite happy. Users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously and chat with their friends on AOL, MSN and Yahoo. This worked well for a while. GAIM even supports Lotus Sametime which is used at my employer. Now I had one client to rule them all. But….I soon discovered that Yahoo support started failing. Then it was fixed. Then MSN support started failing. And was fixed. Then AOL support started failing. And it was fixed. And on and on…….

Of course the problem is that the major IM providers all use different proprietary systems and protocols. They kept making changes to their systems which would break the functionality of GAIM. The GAIM developers would update the software and then the IM vendors would change the protocol and …….on and on.

The search for a solution

Then I bought an Apple Mac mini and a MacBook and I had to start the process all over again. I discovered that OS-X’s iChat messaging client supported on iChat, AOL and Jabber. I never got GAIM to work on OS-X but I did find IM clients based on GAIM such as Adium. Adium was no better than GAIM and crashed very often. I searched for a better way and that way was Cavemonkey.

While Googling for a solution I came across and article on the Cavemonkey blog. The blog’s author, Ronald Heft, Jr. is a freshman at Penn State in Lehigh Valley, PA. He details how to use the Jabber protocol to add Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo and AOL connectivity to iChat. I followed his directions and was soon using iChat to ping my friends. It was when I returned to work the following day and logged into Google Talk that I discovered the brilliance of this solution. All of the IM protocols were bound to my Google Talk account. I could IM my friend on MSN from Google Talk. The magic is that Google Talk is built on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) protocol that was developed by the Jabber open-source community.

“[Jabber is] an open, secure, ad-free alternative to consumer IM services like AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo (see the IM quickstart). Under the hood, Jabber is a set of streaming XML protocols and technologies that enable any two entities on the Internet to exchange messages, presence, and other structured information in close to real time.” — jabber.org

Jabber supports the concepts of transports. A transport is a small computer program that runs on a Jabber server and “translates” messages from other networks into the Jabber format.

Jibber Jabber

So enough already! How do we do this? My buddy Chris P. was excited when I mentioned that I he could use Google Talk to communicate with the other IMs. So these instructions are written for Chris P.

The Google Talk servers do not provide transports so we will using another jabber server and client to bind the transports back to our Google Talk server accounts. A list of public Jabber servers can be found here but for this example I will use the jaim.at server. NOTE: I did this on Windows Vista beta 2 but it will work on Windows XP.

1. Download and install Google Talk.
2. Download and install Psi.
3. Setup Psi to use your Google Talk account. The instructions are here.
4. Now add the public Jabber server to Psi and create and account on that server. Click the Psi symbol in the lower left corner of the Psi application window and select “Account Setup” to launch the Account Manager. In the account manager, click on the add button. On this screen, enter in anything you want to call the account, and be sure to check the register new account check box.
   Now, enter in a user name in the Jabber ID box, and add @[your main Jabber server] to the end of it. Choose a password, and click register. We’re done setting up the account!
   
5. Now we want to attache transports to the Google Talk account. Make sure you are logged into the jabber and the Google Talk account. Right click the account and select “Online”.To add transports right click the Google Talk server icon again and click “Service Discovery”.This will bring up a window with a list of service transports. Since Google Talk servers do not provides transports we need to first connect to a server with the transports we require. Simply enter in the server with the transports in the address field and click browse. Now both Google Talk and regular Jabber users are in sync.
   We will add the MSN transport first but each of the others can be added just as easily.
   
6. Right click the MSN transport and click “Register”. Enter your MSN password and click “Register”. Do the same for all the other transports. Once you’ve registered all your transports, click close, and close Psi. You no longer need it.
7. Launch and log-in to Google Talk and and your contacts should appear instantly.

That’s all there is to it. Now you can use Google Talk to communicate with your buddies on other IM services. There is one caveat regarding adding contacts. When adding contact you will have to use the following format: [contact name]@[protocol].[server]. So if you wanted add a Yahoo account ( shane@yahoo.com) on the jabber server you would use shane@yahoo.jaim.at. MSN contacts ( bhavana@msn.com ) are a little different: bhavana%msn@msn.jaim.at.

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