RSA Day One

Yesterday was day on of the RSA Conference which was kicked off by Bill Gates. He is still not the best speaker in the world and this year he really had very little to say. The main announcement was the pre-release of I.E. 7.0 before it ships with Longhorn. We all have been waiting for Longhorn but I’m wondering what the desktop version will do as it will be lacking Microsofts new secure file system for that it’s a matter of waiting for Longhorn Server. ISA server looks like its trying to draw level with the more established firewall providers by offering an enterprise management consol. Microsofts anti-spam/spyware stuff was ok but I’d seen it before so it was not that much great news. To be honest I was falling asleep throughout the keynote.
A couple of the track sessions in the afternoon were ok but the one from Oracle was very good. Topic was Federated Identity Management – Implementation in Action. An excellent speaker who put all the component parts into context a very insightful thought provoking talk. The only downside was the dumb ass questions, some of these people should not be allowed out in public. I found the Trusted Computing, Identity Management, and Web Services, Enabling the Next Generation of the Internet interesting. The speaker was workmanlike in his delivery but the information was well laid out and was thought provoking. I came away energized with a number of ideas on how the technology could be merged with some other methods for non-repudiation to deliver a more trusted environment.
Best part of yesterday was I managed to sleep. First time my body clock has got in tune with the local time in less than a week.