But DigitalMe and Ezlogin both failed to gain access to this site while Microsoft Passport only works within the Microsoft Network.
He is quick to add, however, that other Microsoft services using Passport could do so, including MSN, Hotmail and the instant-messaging service.
Lesson learned, says Adam Sohn, a Microsoft executive involved with both Passport and .
Microsoft has registered 200 million Passport accounts, largely through its free Hotmail service and Windows XP.
Other services that can't be reached include Windowsupdate.com, which contains updates for the Windows operating system, Passport.com, Microsoft's online identification service, and bCentral.com, a portal for small and medium sized businesses.
The Liberty allies have gone so far as to invite Microsoft to join their group to ensure that Passport and Liberty are interoperable.
Seven years ago Microsoft floated a similar-sounding scheme called Passport that granted users access to any site that agreed to use the same password system.
Microsoft has had to take its ecommerce system, Passport, offline for 48 hours after a programmer in Seattle found a way to steal users' credit card numbers.
But Passport, which stores personal information on Microsoft's servers, still lets customers use wildly insecure passwords like "password, " and lets anyone who knows your zip code take several cracks at guessing the personal "secret question" that resets the password.
Click it and you are urged to sign up for Passport, a key repository of personal information used by Microsoft's Hailstorm Web-based services.
Sun Microsystems, Microsoft's bitter nemesis, stoked the worries and in early summer began contacting companies to pitch the idea of "federating" to create a nonproprietary alternative to Passport, letting their sites link up more easily without Microsoft as middleman.
And even the programmer concerned said that users of Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system, which is irrevocably integrated with Passport as a means of forcing it into the mainstream, would not have been affected.
Two weeks before the Liberty group was announced, Microsoft caught wind of the move and announced a strategy to create its own "federation" for Passport.
应用推荐