Saturday, August 23, 2008

New single signon at sun.com


By day I have a normal job, doing programming at Sun Microsystems, for Solaris, where we are encourraged to blog, from time to time, about what's on our mind or what we're doing at work. It's a relatively big company and has lots of infrastructure run by different people. Some things start out small, on their own, only to get rolled up into the corporate mess later. One such example of this is the blog website they have for employees, past as well as present.


From time to time I used to scribble there about what was on my mind, more often about current affairs than about work. But of late there seems to have been an infrastructure change and now blogs.sun.com wants you to login via identity.sun.com. Well, that doesn't work for me. I've had a different blog account name to username for downloading from sun.com and both of those are different to my internal Sun logins - and for very good reason: I update and edit my blog from wherever I might be, using a different username and password to everything else, thereby not exposing internal login details to the whims of the Internet. For downloading, I've been using a username/password that predates my blog account and is just a random email addres/password/username - they don't need to know who I am when I'm downloading the latest CD/DVD images from the Internet.


Now they want me to use just one username/password for everything.


Sounds great, sounds simple, sounds amazing.


But it now requires cookies to be exchangedbetween parts of sun.com's website that I'd previously not allowed. Sorry Sun, my privacy policy does not agree with your new expanded use of cookies and logins.


So it would seem that any further blogging by me on blogs.sun.com will have to be from work - I'm not even sure if that will work yet. I don't know if they'll get what they wanted from that.