Postal Service Pilots 'Federal Cloud Credential Exchange' 54
CowboyRobot writes with news about a federal initiative to support federated authentication for government services. From the article: "The U.S. Postal Service will be the guinea pig for a White House-led effort to accelerate government adoption of technologies that allow federal agencies to accept third-party identity credentials for online services. The program involves using services ... through standards like OpenID rather than requiring users to create government usernames and passwords. ... The federated identity effort, known as the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange, is just one piece of a broader Obama administration online identity initiative: the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which aims to catalyze private sector-led development of a secure, digital 'identity ecosystem' to better protect identities online. ... The Postal Service pilot is but one of several different pilots that are part of NSTIC. There are also three cryptography pilots and two non-cryptographic privacy pilots in the works. Each of those pilots is being carried out by multiple private sector organizations ranging from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to AOL to AARP to Aetna."
Re:About time! (Score:5, Insightful)
The USPS should have gotten into certificates a long time ago. Is it any wonder they're going under?
They're going under because they are facing the same pressures as the Royal Mail in the UK - private companies can pick and choose profitable delivery while dumping the unprofitable stuff on the national mail carrier who simply *must* take on the stuff that private companies would ignore as unprofitable. The USPS has it slightly better than the Royal Mail because third party carriers can't put things in your mailbox (there is no such restriction here), but parcel delivery companies are seriously squeezing them.
Also because you can send something across the whole US for a buck or so and be almost certain it will get there in a couple of days, come rain or shine.