PC/SC is really not a pure Microsoft product : it was a best-fit design, to harmonise the chaos that evolved with the industry with the application platform, without interfering with the nature of the market, the sensitivities of VISA, and various national issues we will not even go into.
(This is all opinion, not insider info, BTW)
if MS has standardized smartcards, continued with its own .NET smartcard, and had even put CCID and a standard card handler in the retail build (it doesnt!), it would have lost the support of the PC/SC group members, IMO. The industry today wants direct access to the consumer, and no commodity behaviour. The parties did recognize that they need some help from the platform though, once PCMCIA cryptodevices and then pure PCI devices had broken through. Their success and ease of integration was making smartcard integration look hopelessly outmoded.
Lets take our own recent members documented attempt to make something simple work, as an example. That poor person's attempt to sign a blob was excrutiating to watch. First, learn about PDUs, then learn about USB, then learn about about vendor's X exceptions, then learn about applets, then learn about personalization, then learn that the card was not standard's conforming anyway; then sign an NDA to get the spec sheet, and start again. Learn about PC/SC, and the escape codes need to make the thing work. Then realize the T0 may be host driven, or reader driven, so buffer management in 2 downstream (from 1970s work when RAM was hard to get) becomes an important protocol issue.
All that, in 2004, just to interface a pentium to an ARM's/8051's chips crypto firmware over a 1960's asynch serial bus!
If we are to have bio-passports based on ICCs, we are not keeping this legacy stuff. Period.
Watch LIVE baseball games on your computer with MLB.TV, included with MSN Premium!
_______________________________________________ Muscle mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.drizzle.com/mailman/listinfo/muscle
