[Auth]Re - [Auth} A simple server-side authentication scheme

[Carsten Kuckuk]

Norbert,

> We need an approach that can quickly scale to a significant
> percentage of all ecommerce transactions - anything else is not
> a suitable strategy for reaching the goal of getting a
> significant maerketshare quickly.

I think you're making the second step before the first: you want
an extremely reliable system without any design flaws in the first
version? Reliable enough to make commercial transactions where the
developers that did everything in their spare time run the risk
of being sued if some commercial transactions did not work out 
correctly?

Why not go for something less critical, but with much higher 
visibility like e-mail management, file storage, discussion 
boards, mailing list management, workgroup support like calenders?

> For systems with rely on a small number of servers, Microsoft
> has big advantages.  I see no reason to believe that we could do
> it better than Microsoft can, in this area.

Open-source hobbyist on the other hand have a lot of servers at
their disposal which are ideal for distributed storage of identity
information if a fault-tolerant system can be worked out. If you 
stick with LAMP architecture on the server side, the system
can be rolled out right now on millions of servers.

The feedback would be valueable for version two which would then 
experience feature-bloat with PKI and all that.

Carsten Kuckuk <-- on digest