IBM joins Liberty Alliance

IBM has become the latest company to join the Liberty Alliance, a global consortium aimed at developing standards for managing user identities, reports Computerworld.

The Liberty Alliance was established in 2001, but IBM initially chose to pursue its own identity management standards.

Microsoft has repositioned its .Net Passport identification system and no longer sees it as a single sign-on system for the Web, reports PC World.

According to the report, Microsoft now says Passport will be limited to its own online offerings and those of close partners. Microsoft`s repositioning of .Net Passport comes as the Web site Monster.com said it was dropping support of the authentication service.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) says it will seek regulatory authority for the federal government over Internet-based telephone services to avoid stifling the emerging market, reports USA Today.

FCC chairman Michael Powell says that letting states regulate VOIP services would lead to a patchwork of conflicting rules like those that have constrained traditional phone business. Powell says he expects to introduce a proposal to the FCC in less than a month.

Less than a month after IBM claimed the world`s fastest computer crown from NEC, the Japanese company says it is trying to win back the honour with a new supercomputer to be available at the end of the year.

PC World says NEC believes its SX-8 vector supercomputer will have a peak processing performance of 65 teraflops, which is almost twice as fast as the 36.01 teraflops achieved in September by a prototype version of IBM`s Blue Gene supercomputer.