You know today you open the newspaper or watch TV and there’s so many frauds, scams on identity theft and there’s a couple of reasons why that’s so. Using the online world browsing chatting and emailing and you require to have a login and password at every website. Hotmail, Google, MSN we need to have a login, password, so what do we do? We have the same combination of login password so you don’t have spend mental cycles on it remembering. Is that secure?

Not really right? But we still do it … we still do it. Digital Identity theft is a big big problem today; banks are loosing billions of dollars in that. One is that you know because you have to remember so many user names and passwords, you just end up using the same ones and now if there’s any malware on any computer, say my mums computer, it’s just going to skim the user name and password and use it elsewhere and so on.Two, there is no consistent way of implementing that, because every site requires a different combination. Like you have to have alphabet, alphanumeric, this and that, at least this number of characters long, so there is no real consistent way of storing that information.Think about the other problem now. So I’ve talked about what the drawback of usernames and passwords is. Second is … who are you? It’s a question to you. Who are you?

Me? Who is me? Are you recognised by a passport when you travel? Are you recognised by a driver’s license when you get a ticket? Are you recognised by your credit card, the one you carry or recognised by a face when you go home and say “Hey Honey I’m back!”?

All of those things!

Why not only one? Why not only one? Why not have just one document?

Exactly! And there’s different context right? Basically this central identity about you just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in physical life, it’s not going to work in your online world. What InfoCard does is it provides you a Digital Wallet.

There are two pieces there. One is you carry different identities and then the second piece of that is that there is an identity provider. In the physial world is the govenment issuing you a driver’s license or a council issuing you a passport and so on. In the same way “InfoCard” has something similar called your cards. There are two kinds of cards. One is a self-issued card which you create for yourself that has some claims about you, saying like “My name is Parimal, I’m the product manager and my phone number is this or my email number is this”. The second card is an issued card and issued by a content provider for example a security provider such as a bank, or credit card like American Express.

The interesting thing is the information isn’t really stored in the card; it’s stored in the secure system, behind the secure token service of the provider. So the advantages for users when they log into a web site is you don’t really have to really login in and enter your password you can just select the “InfoCard” that then lets you log in, and you can select various cards to do online transactions, because the information isn’t stored in the card per sae, and it’s a secure experience. If there is malware it cannot skim it, because there is no information there.

It’s not really a physical card it’s an online card, the other interesting thing is the UI, you know you are going to see a demo of that today, runs in a separate desktop account which means again if there is again any malware, it just cannot access what’s going on in your “InfoCard” UI, it’s in a separate context, everything else feasible is disabled. So inherently it’s a feature that makes the online world a lot safer and help’s you do online transactions but with a lot less mental cycles and with very few clicks of the mouse.

“InfoCard” is a WinFX component just like the Windows Presentation Foundation, just like Windows Commication Foundation and just like Windows Workflow Foundation, as a result because although WinFX is a Vista component it will work on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, same with “InfoCard”.

You can create “InfoCard”s and then take them from PC to PC.

WinFX has had multiple CTPs for the last so many months. The latest CTP was in Feb. In fact if users on to WinFX Developers Centre on MSDN they can download them runtime components that has all these APIs. The RTM of WinFX is tied to Windows Vista RTMs for businesses late this year or other users it’s early next year, but WinFX is really for businesses for them to develop these applications so its going to be late this year when its going to RTM.

Thanks very much, my pleasure!

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