A new report by analyst research firm, International Data Corp., predicts the market for identity and access management (IAM) products will grow to approximately $4 billion by 2009. This is nearly double the $2.3 billion IAM market in 2004.

I will also keep some useful pointers on this page.

When I try to explain what identity management is, I like to refer to a famous cartoon from the New Yorker: “on the internet nobody knows you are a dog”.

I received yesterday the latest issue of Wired magazine, where there is an interesting article about on-line poker and how people let computer programs play on their behalf (Wired 09|2005, p. 96, article by David Kushner). The previous quote can therefore be extended to: “on the internet, nobody knows you are a bot”.

Proving that you are who you pretend to be is hard.
Proving that you are not a bot is going to be even harder, requiring some complicated dialog.

Or maybe there is a simple solution. Ask the person to sign-on (using whatever technique he or she fancies) and then ask him/her to resolve a puzzle that only a human can solve: e.g. digits or letters in an image. The problem is that you have to repeat the process at random times to make sure the human has not been replaced by a bot.