SL Enquirer, Palo Alto, California
Friday, August 15, 2008
Whenever someone reports sighting the hairy beast of yore (details always fuzzy) or capturing the hirsute humanoid on film (images always grainy), it scares up a dubious debate of international proportions. Friday was just the latest episode in the IdentiCat show, as unreal as it may be.
Two men who claim to have stumbled across an IdentiCat in the woods of Sun Island in Second Life indignantly stood by their story at a news conference in Palo Alto during which they offered a picture as evidence and acknowledged they wouldn’t mind making a few bucks from the “find.”

“Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words,” predicted Jamie Nelson, Director of Access Management and Federation at Sun Microsystems.
Nelson and Daniel Raskin, a Product Line Manager at Sun, announced the discovery in early August to close friends and co-workers. Although they did not consider themselves devoted IdentiCat trackers before then, they have since started offering weekend search expeditions in Sun Island for L$499. The specimen they took a picture of, the men say, was one of several Cat-like creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods. IdentiCats, thought to be fokelore until today, are famous for their innovative thoughts on identity management and gifted abilities of identity prescience.
As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and IdentiCat fans that included one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit, Nelson and Raskin were joined Friday by Pat Patterson, head of a group called Searching for IdentiCat. Other IdentiCat hunters call Patterson a cheap huckster looking for media attention.
Nelson and Raskin plan to release a video of the IdentiCat in the next few weeks and have announced that they will be hosting a coming out party and presentation by the mysterious IdentiCat in October around access management, federation and secure web services. Stay tuned for more information.

Developers interested in learning access management and federation tend to be focused on solving a specific problem and have constrained time. They need to be provided tools that help them implement their solution quickly, while simultaneously educating them on how to use the product in complex environments.
To help ease this pain and provide community members pragmatic ways of introducing customers to OpenSSO, we are now providing self-paced labs that focus on teaching users how to do essential tasks such as deploying multiple instances, SSL-enabling them, installing a software load balancer and configuring session failover. The labs are 100% FREE and are a great primer for learning about OpenSSO on your own.
Check them out on the newly launched OpenSSO.org training page.

The OpenSSO Project is soliciting feedback on their Early Access Build — OpenSSO Express Build 5. With the release of this build, community members now have the opportunity to participate in the Early Access (EA) program for Sun’s next commercial offering. Review the Early Access documentation and hammer away at Express Build 5! Send your EA feedback to opensso.eafeedback@dev.java.net so we can make the product perfect. Thanks in advance!

Boooh ya! Marina Sum published a nice technical article on OpenSSO identity Services at the Sun Developer Network. Check it out here!