Passport : Java Glossary

There are two ways to use it. In one you first get a free hotmail account. This automatically gives you three things:

• A free web-based mail account.
• an MSN instant messenger id (same as your hotmail account).
• An MSN Passport. Microsoft does no validation check on you to issue the Passport. It does not even require you to have an existing email account. This scheme is purely for convenience, not for shopping or identification as the name might suggest.

Using Passport the second way, you get just a Passport account based on an existing non-hotmail email account. Microsoft uses a dishonest ploy to trick you into divulging your email account password by asking you to type in the email account password, not explaining what they are actually asking for is a different thing — a password for the Passport account, not for your email account. Microsoft has no need of your email account password and no business asking for it. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, they simplify things for the dummies who don’t understand the difference by leading them to use the same password for both purposes.

Microsoft sends you an email to verify you once received mail at that address. They do no other verification. Everything in the Passport application could be a complete fabrication and no one would know. It is nothing like a digital certificate id.

What is wrong with this picture? Many people don’t trust Microsoft with such sensitive information. Microsoft is notoriously bad at keeping hackers out of their customers’ machines and even their own servers. Microsoft potentially could sell this information, and information about your buying habits to others. Once you have given this information to Microsoft there is really no way to retract it, no matter how badly they behave. Further, the websites have to pay Microsoft every time they need any information. If the system were to become entrenched, Microsoft could keep cranking up the price per transaction, and the website vendors could not do much about it.

Liberty is a decentralised alternative to the centralised Microsoft scheme.