Live data from Hacker News

Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

stavros.io

181–190 of 243 posts

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#181
post #122
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty easy to register TrumpRulez2016@yahoo.com for that purpose.

Registering Yahoo addresses is actually anything but "simple" anymore.

Use Mailinator for your throwaway email address needs:

https://mailinator.com/

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#182
post #36

Anyone who wants to see a demo of it, just sign-in here (top right): https://login.persona.org/ Anyone who wants to see how easy it is to deploy (JS on your page, a button, and callback verifier on your server): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Persona/Quick_Setup Anyone who wants to see it in action: https://www.lfgss.com/ I love everything about Persona except for the fact that Mozilla are no longer supporting a…

To address some of your points: 1) That is completely controlled by the site owner. In my sites, for example, I just disabled the Persona JS while the user was logged in, so there was no global log-out possible. 2) I believe the bridge was just a proof of concept, with the intention of email providers supporting Persona directly so all the security could be implemented there. I know you said "default bridge", but my…

If you're so supportive of Persona, why don't you make your work in the area (persowna.net) FOSS?

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#183

I don't really see the point in this and this is why: let's say Persona won and all the big ones switched to it (Facebook, Google, Twitter etc.) by becoming providers. Most people would still be using their Facebook, Google or Twitter persona anyway (except for a few privacy sensitive users who don't like SaaS anyway because it's bad for privacy according to them). So we would have a situation that would be de facto…

You misunderstand how Persona works. You can't log in with Facebook or Twitter, because they don't provide your email address. You can log in with an email address, and the email provider doesn't know what sites you're logging in to. Try https://pastery.net , log in there. If you have a Gmail account, you'll just click "accept" and you're in.

I just tried it and it redirected me to google oauth2 dialog. Same thing. If anything, it's one step more than using google's oauth2 directly.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#184
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To address some of your points: 1) That is completely controlled by the site owner. In my sites, for example, I just disabled the Persona JS while the user was logged in, so there was no global log-out possible. 2) I believe the bridge was just a proof of concept, with the intention of email providers supporting Persona directly so all the security could be implemented there. I know you said "default bridge", but my…

If you're so supportive of Persona, why don't you make your work in the area (persowna.net) FOSS?

I just might.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#185
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn and Facebook can do this because your email is not your username. There likely isn't really a username in those systems, just a user id. Almost all systems have a user id, but the distinction here is slightly different. Instead of a user record which has an id, username and possibly full name, Facebook likely has a user record with an id, a (display) username, and then there is a separate set of auth records…

You are describing the tripartite identity pattern: http://habitatchronicles.com/2008/10/the-tripartite-identity...

For the most part. My example was more a bipartite pattern, because I was covering the authentication aspects, not the entire identity structure (which I believe Facebook and LinkedIn would implement as the article outlines). For a system where you don't need to track multiple social identities, and where you interact within that system through your identity on that system, that's probably enough.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#186
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn and Facebook can do this because your email is not your username. There likely isn't really a username in those systems, just a user id. Almost all systems have a user id, but the distinction here is slightly different. Instead of a user record which has an id, username and possibly full name, Facebook likely has a user record with an id, a (display) username, and then there is a separate set of auth records…

What you're describing is "use a synthetic primary key for your User", which is something even the most naive junior web developer does automatically these days. There's nothing special about LinkedIn and Facebook except that they went through the trouble of adding additional authentication mechanisms. You can too, no matter what you treat as a "username".

I'm not entirely sure where you got the impression I was implying it was hard and esoteric, and only Facebook and LinkedIn could do so. I was simply noting that there's a difference between email as a username and email as part of one or more authentication tokens, and the differences in design and how it affects the possible future need of users to change what are often usable as authentication (email addresses, phone numbers, etc).

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#187

Not sure if anyone realizes this, but Mozilla is not really an open source thing. It's a company that happens to be a nonprofit. It deploys resources and runs itself like a Silicon Valley company. It's not just a bunch of dudes in their basements writing code. They have like $330 million in annual revenue. They are sitting on like $90 million in cash. Mozilla isn't about software for its own sake or just for the sake…

I've got plenty of quibbles with Mozilla (including their handling of Persona) but "open source thing" and "company" are not mutually exclusive. We need more entities with lots of resources doing almost exclusively open source.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#188
The message I got from Persona was "hey we're developing this thing, it'll be part of Firefox." Sounded like a pretty good idea to me and the signal for it being ready so I could reasonably push for adoption. Then it got shut down for no apparent reason.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#189
I backed persona with a well written example back when it first 'came out' into the mainstream: https://github.com/sergiotapia/ASP.Net-MVC3-Persona-Demo

It was super easy to integrate, better UX in my eyes, but Mozilla just shut it down for some reason. It died down.

I hope they assign more resources to it. I hate having Facebook sign ins on my website.

Re: Open Letter to Mozilla: Bring Back Persona

#190
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Registering Yahoo addresses is actually anything but "simple" anymore.

Use Mailinator for your throwaway email address needs: https://mailinator.com/

Almost everybody blacklists mailinator addresses these days...
Post reply on HN