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CoreStreet announced the availability of the CoreStreet FIPS-201 Suite of products to upgrade existing physical access control systems to be fully compliant with HSPD-12 and all functionality as defined in Special Publication 800-116. The company also announced that its PIVMAN products is available with Lenel and a partnership with MaxID to market PIVMAN with the company’s handheld ID readers.

Special Publication 800-116, as published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in November, covers recommendations for the use of Personal Identity Verification credentials in access control systems.

The CoreStreet FIPS-201 Suite of products permits government agencies to upgrade system to enable the verification of PIV cards, Common Access Cards, First Responder Authentication Credential cards and Transportation Worker Identification Credential cards without requiring the replacement of the existing system. The Solution verifies these cards at assurance levels as defined in SP 800-116.

The CoreStreet FIPS-201 Suite consists of the following components:

• CoreStreet FIPS-201 F5 System: Adds PIV, CAC, FRAC and TWIC credential compatibility to an existing PACS

• CoreStreet FIPS-201 Device Developer Bundle and CoreStreet FIPS-201 Head-end Developer Bundle: Software developer kits allowing OEM vendors to build SP 800-116 compliance into their products.

The other two announcements deal with CoreStreet’s PIVMAN product. The PIVMAN Suite of software products provides solutions for several identity and access management.

The standard CoreStreet PIVMAN Solution aggregates identity and attribute information from a variety of trusted sources for access to government buildings, port facilities or disaster sites as part of the National Preparedness Framework. Through integration with OnGuard, the CoreStreet PIVMAN for Lenel Solution allows access levels configured in OnGuard to be displayed on mobile handhelds running the CoreStreet PIVMAN Client software.

Further, the CoreStreet PIVMAN for Lenel Solution retrieves audit logs from the Clients and uploads them to OnGuard for display in the Alarm Monitoring application, and for use in activities such as mustering and reporting.

Also, CoreStreet and MaxID have formed a partnership to market the CoreStreet PIVMAN Solution on MaxID’s iDLMax biometric handheld device.

Hyper-V Server management

Well, i’ll be blunt. Hyper-V Server standalone management sucks. Big time. The problem here is that you need a Vista machine (which is a problem in the testlab which mostly consists of older PCs), and then you’ll need to create same-username same-password accounts to connect the two.

Also, if you just want to delegate specific VMs, you’ll need to dive into the depths of WMI.

Many of those problems vanish when you’re using a domain setup, with Hyper-V Server joined to the domain. But that’s usually not the case in a test lab.

Add to that that Server Core is still very young, and a lot of 3rd party hardware manufacturers do not have anything Server Core ready yet. Many don’t even announce whether certain tools are supported on Server Core or not.

This doesn’t mean Server Core is a bad idea - it just means that we will need to wait for hardware manufacturers to catch up - also management agents like Backup, Anti Virus, etc. will need to get up to speed for running on Server Core.

ESXi management

ESXi works very well with standalone management. You go to the website, download the VI Client, enter user and password, and you can manage the VM host - you can also delegate permissions easily.

From what i’ve read so far, using single signon and Active Directory with ESXi is more cumbersome than on Hyper-V server. Makes sense.

ESXi integrates a lot of hardware drivers and management. However, fewer servers are supported than with Hyper-V Server. On the other hand, you can use the native ESXi tools to create teams etc., something which you can’t on Server Core because the HW manufacturers do not ship the tools for Server Core.

My opinion

ESXi works very well in a standalone lab environment. Hyper-V is lackluster at best. What does that mean for you? If you want to build a test lab, go with hardware that supports ESXi, or if that is too expensive, go with hardware that at least works with ESXi.

DocuSign, an e-signature service, closed $5 million in Series D funding from Frazier Technology Ventures, Ignition Partners, Sigma Partners, and West River Capital LLC. The funding follows a Series C investment of $12.4 million in 2007 from the same investors.

DocuSign, which was founded in 2003, allows companies to get legally binding signatures quickly over the internet instead of over the fax or mail. DocuSign certifies digital signatures over the web, acting as a intermediary who holds the documents and verifies the identity of the signature. The digital signature business was really opened up during the turn of the century with that passing of the UETA and ESIGN acts, which clarified the legal grounds for electronic signatures nationwide. To date, more than 25 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign. Competitors include EchoSign, and VeriSign.

Facebook US traffic data for April is in from Compete. During the last month, traffic to the main Facebook.com site grew by 4.6%, a healthy pace but also a slowdown from its torrid 11% monthly growth rate in March.

In addition, Facebook Connect continued to grow in terms of the total number of US internet users who are visiting Facebook Connect-enabled sites and using Facebook Connect-enabled desktop and mobile applications. While this number does not necessarily correlate to increased usage of Connect, it does mean that Connect is getting implemented across a variety of sites.

Meanwhile, MySpace traffic was flat for April at 55 million US uniques, and Twitter jumped to nearly 20 million total US uniques in the month, up an incredible 38.6% from April.

While the Compete numbers are just one estimate, it is notable that Facebook’s growth rate slowed considerably from March to a more sustainable pace. However, Facebook.com’s reach still grew by over 3.5 million US uniques during the month, to 76.8 million.

L-1 Identity Solutions, a developer of biometric technology and other identity solutions, has announced that they have been granted a contract with the State of Texas for upgrading existing L-1 technology in the state to include hand scanners. The scanners themselves will be utilized by Texas law enforcement agencies in keeping up with advancing sex offenders and offenders against children laws.

BAA has awarded a contract for cabling at the new heathrow Terminal 5C – a satellite to Terminal 5 - to Carillion IT services.

The contract will see Carillion IT Services provide cabling to 5,000 points ranging from passenger information displays to gate desk computer systems and shops.

In June 2008 Carillion IT Services signed an initial four-year framework agreement with BAA IT for on-site services.

This includes cabling for voice, data and other airport specific network systems, cabling for new projects and 'break-fix' maintenance for existing cabling infrastructures across all seven BAA UK airports, including Heathrow.

The government today announced plans to keep innocent people on the DNA database despite a landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last year saying that they should be removed.

Those arrested but not convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes will be kept on the database for 12 years while those arrested but not convicted of all other crimes will be kept on the database for six years.

The move is a shock as the government had previously indicated the government would remove the DNA profiles, samples and fingerprints of 850,000 innocent people kept on the database.

Launching the public consultation on the proposals, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said today:

"As I said in December, I have real sympathy for all those victims and victims' families who have concerns that any move could undermine a system that helped trap murderers and rapists, such as Sally Ann Bowman's killer."

The government also proposes to retain the profiles of anyone convicted of an offence indefinitely.

The Home Office defended the policy by saying that in 2006-7 alone there were 41,717 crimes with DNA matches, including 452 homicides, 644 rapes, 222 other sex offences and 1,872 other violent crimes.

But human rights groups and opposition politicians expressed dismay at the move and predicted a rapid legal challenge.

Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling criticised the move, saying the Conservatives favoured the Scottish system, where a DNA sample is taken on arrest but then deleted if the person is cleared.

"I can see no reason to be storing the DNA of people who have not been convicted of any offence," he said.

Director of Liberty Shami Chakrabarti said: "Wholly innocent people – including children – will have their most intimate details stockpiled for years on a database that will remain massively out of step with the rest of the world. "

At last year’s annual f8 event, Digg came on stage to announce that they would be officially supporting Facebook Connect. Almost one year later, support has finally gone live. We’ve take a look and it’s a pretty basic integration. Essentially you can login using your Facebook account and whenever you Digg an article, you are prompted with the option of publishing that Digg to your feed. I haven’t yet figured out if new Diggs will be published twice if you had previously imported your Digg account.

Kevin Rose announced the service this afternoon on the Digg blog. In addition to publishing your Diggs to Facebook, you can also publish comments and new submissions to your personal feed. It’s definitely a great addition for Digg in that they get more exposure but I’m not quite sure how this is the “Future of Digg” as Jay Adelson called it at Web 2.0 Expo.

Most interesting is that many of Digg’s features are already built into Facebook. With Facebook’s open feed, there are already many opportunities to duplicate much of Digg’s functionality into other applications. For example a news article aggregator which track what Facebook users are sharing most. Regardless of the potential for duplicating many of Digg’s features, Facebook clearly has a lot to gain from the launch of Digg’s Facebook Connect support.

Some had previously suggested that the company would get increased news feed presence through a negotiation with Facebook. Thanks to the Facebook redesign, there is now much less emphasis on optimizing for news feed visibility since all stories get published. It will be interesting to see how many Digg users end up integrating with Facebook Connect.

Evermedia Biometrics, a developer of iris recognition systems, has finalized an agreement with Nations ID, a developer of information security and management systems, to jointly develop a multi-modal Match-On-Card (MOC) system. The major intent behind a MOC system is to remove the need for storing biometric templates of users on a central database, as the encrypted information is located on the user’s ID card itself and requires the user’s biometric sample each time to be used.

The two companies are hopeful that the result of their joint effort will be received as a solution for the needs for next generation of military and government agency ID needs. Because of their MOC system intending to be multi-modal, it will be near-spoof-proof and ideal for use at points of access for secured areas. The MOC is expected to meet a number of standards including those from ISO, NIST and ANSI.

As debates have raged regarding the inclusion of an contactless smart card chips in Swiss passports containing the holder’s biometric information, experts such as Zurich’s Rapperswil Technical College professor of Internet technology Peter Heinzmann have spoken out on the potential for abuse, according to a Swiss Info article.

The debate sides see the matter as a potential for easing and securing border entries all over the world versus worries of poor data protection and will be decided by a public vote on May 17th.

Some of the concerns revolve around data protection and the misuse of the data. Heinzmann gives the example of the central database of biometric information being an attractive target for hackers as well as advertisers.

Heinzmann suggests quashing worries by reviewing procedures and having multi-layered security around the database.

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