Just before I met Chuck Mortimore for the first time (and some time after he had left SXIP), I was told by somebody I’m not supposed to identify that he’s one of the smarter guys around (to make this an understatement).

If that conjecture needed any proof, here it is: late last night, he released his own “InfoCard” implementation, in Java, running entirely inside Firefox. With no Microsoft code, built entirely from scratch, and while working full-time on his (unrelated) main job. Wow!

This is how it works (I believe, could be wrong in some details):

• You download a Firefox plugin from his website.
• This plugin is a mix of Mozilla-specific code and Java.
• When you visit an “InfoCard”-enabled site, such as this one, the plugin pops up, and asks you to select a card, just like InfoCard will do on Windows.
• The GUI is fairly basic so far, consisting mostly of forms. However, the paradigms are the same as Microsoft’s: you collect information about you as “cards”, and select one of those cards to send to the Relying Party when it asks.
• Right now, it only supports self-asserted cards, but if those work, everything else can be made to work, too.

Chuck will be coming to the Internet Identity Workshop tomorrow, and I hope he’ll give us a demo. I just tried it out myself, and you can do, too, by going to his announcement post.

Now we just need to nail down the exact legal details whether Microsoft will be able to let us (i.e. everybody but Microsoft) do these things perpetually, or whether they might assert intellectual property rights of some kind in the future. I hope we can have fruitful discussions at IIW on that this week …