Maybe I'm an exception but I don't know someone that loves the Microsoft's
Passport system...
Passport wants to be an unique identity key to access every
Microsoft's site and service but despite these ambitions, I think it's a big
failure... it works good only with IE and it's always a terrible noise.
But why this? Because today is appeared an article
about what will be the future of Passport, InfoCard.
InfoCard is a project that was officially proposed at the beginning of
this year and it wants to be a totally new identity project, more secure,
distributed and cross platform. Here
you can find more details about this project and the diagram below (thanks
to Hubert A. Le Van Gong) shows how the system will work:
The system is undoubtely a big improvement but I'm always sceptic on these
types of centralized authentication systems. Will they be more secure? And what
about the information stored on the local user's pc?
InfoCard will store some of the user's personal information
in a secure area of the operating system of the user's machine... is this so
secure? And what about general availability when the user's pc is turned off?
I've a lot of doubt about this... 
However, if a day I can login to Microsoft's website with something better
than Passport, it's always welcome! 