Who Do You Want To Be Today? - HP and Microsoft Planning Identity Systems Dominance

Dennis Miller once said that "Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian cat away from being a bad guy in a James Bond movie." Last week, Hewlett-Packard announced that it, along with Gates' Microsoft, is getting set to make a push into yet another market currently dominated by small niche players and Unix-based software platforms -- identity management systems at the national level. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy doesn't it? The idea of building a national identification system on a software platform whose best claim to fame is its legendary lack of security seems ludicrous at best; but there it is. Hewlett-Packard's release of its National Identity System is based on Microsoft software such as Microsoft Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (64-bit), the Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft Services with HP providing the hardware, integration and support. The basic idea, according to the UK IT-tabloid The Register (Who's Trusted in Trusted Computing? Microsoft's efforts in the Trusted Computing initiative (code-named "Palladium" and expected to be rolled out as part of the long-awaited Longhorn update of Windows XP) have gotten off to a rocky start. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) (