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Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

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Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#251
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots and lots and lots of sites fail because they depend on jquery hosted by google.

Interesting, that makes their altruistic (CDN) hosting seem slightly more strategic.

I wish people would explain their downvotes more (I just bumped you from 0).

Is it too short? Or not insightful enough? Or.. do you disagree with his opinion?

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an issue that needs to be dealt with in schools, because it's going to be VERY important by the time current kids grow up, and most of them don't know what they're doing. Here's what I do. I have two branches of passwords: one unsecure and easy to dictionary attack, another that was randomly generated and I got into muscle memory when I was a boy. Each secure site gets its own slightly different versi…

I use pretty much the exact same system that you do and have done so for many years as well. Recently though, I'm starting to think I might try out the password management software route. I've haven't yet had a problem with any of my accounts being brute forced and I guess there's something to be said for "if it 'aint broke...", but reviewing the passwords I use, even the more secure ones, I have this nagging feeling…

As long as each of your secure sites has encrypted the password in their database, which they damn well should be doing, an attacker wouldn't be able to benefit from any similarities because they wouldn't know what your password actually is. Right?

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#253
Personally I don't like any of these global logon initiatives. I don't use Stackoverflow because I never found a way to login without using OpenID. Since I don't like a bunch of random web sites being able to connect me so easily, to use Stackoverflow I would have to go to one of those openID sites and make a fake account or set up my own OpenID provider. Both of these options are extremely inconvenient. I'm used to having a different user id/password for every site I have an account on so that's very easy for me.

I haven't looked into the technical details deeply but people keep talking like OpenID is safe. I assume sites that use OpenID never see my user name and password but what if the site says that it uses OpenID but actually just stores my user name and password? Would I have any way of recognizing that the site was using fake OpenID?

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#254
post #7

This is by far my largest complaint with Quora.

Quora is one of the first sites that I've allowed to connect via Facebook, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it's worked so far. They haven't spammed my wall at all (like most other things), and the site itself became much more interesting as soon as I was connected to all of my friends & interests.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#255

Personally I don't like any of these global logon initiatives. I don't use Stackoverflow because I never found a way to login without using OpenID. Since I don't like a bunch of random web sites being able to connect me so easily, to use Stackoverflow I would have to go to one of those openID sites and make a fake account or set up my own OpenID provider. Both of these options are extremely inconvenient. I'm used to…

Perhaps you should try something before you dismiss it.

Sites you log into using OpenID never see your password. (For that matter, any competent OpenID provider will never store your password in cleartext, so they won't know it either.) The only thing the site knows is your OpenID url, and when you sign in using that, it redirects you there, to enter your password.

Live example. I use myopenid.com to provide OpenID services, delegated via a link rel="openid.delegate" tag on my personal site, bbot.org.

When I want to sign in via OpenID on a site, say, livejournal, I type in "bbot.org". Livejournal looks at that site, reads the link tag, and sends me to myopenid.com. I sign in there, and it sends me back to livejournal, now logged in.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#256
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the following Adblock Plus filter rule would do the trick: ||facebook.com^$third-party

This is what you want: ||facebook.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net ||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net ||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net ||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com|~facebook.net|~fbcdn.com|~fbcdn.net The key is to allow FB's CDN when on FB, but to disallow it and everything else when not on FB. I'm never on FB…

Worked a treat, cheers.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#257

After years of lurking on Hacker News, I finally created an account simply to be able to post the strongest agreement possible with the original post. I do not use Facebook, and I do not wish to use Facebook, and I do not believe that I should be treated as an Unperson because of this choice. If a site wants to make certain its users/members are using their "real identity", better solutions can be found than tying th…

This sort of attitude is not the norm in the general population (citation needed? Ask your non-programmer friends).

No one is forcing you to use a site that requires Facebook, but obviously (based on the comments here like yours) companies requiring it should probably rethink this if their primary audience is tech-savvy geeks.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#258
There is no reason for the login API to be proprietary:

Universal Login 1.0 File:

    (ULAPI-1.0 (username "oconnore")
     (seed "a3k5...") (password-hash "pq3i...") (password-hash "ve83...") 
     (additional-information (eye-color "brown") (email "@.com") ...)))
To create an account on a site, you give the site your UL url, and your password, and it associates the url with your user name in its database. Now when you want to login to a site, you give it your user name, and your password. The back end retrieves the file, hashes your password with the seed, and if it matches a hash in your UL file, voila, you are accepted.

Cool benefits of this are that you can use separate passwords for your bank and your twitter, and you can host your own ID (or pick someone you trust), only allow certain servers to request it, dynamically generate a unique ID for each site, etc.

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#259

I find no problem with OpenID. There are many free OpenId providers out there, and if you really don't want to use one, you can create your own fairly easily.

The issue is that it should be an extension for your app, not a rule. I think, that the best way is to always do you own auth system and maybe improve it using OpenId providers.

why?

Re: Start ups, please don't force me to log in with Facebook

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The items you mentioned mitigate but do not "solve" the problem. We often have users forget what email address they used when they first signed up (work, personal, their kids email because they aren't a "computer person", etc). Probably not so coincidentally, these same users are the ones that struggle the most with basic computer tasks like opening a URL from an email, etc.

You can just let users initiate a request with their login name, no?

This assumes that something like their e-mail address is static: in the real world it isn't. Normal users often use e-mail addresses assigned to them from their ISP, school, or work, and think nothing of the fact that these are needlessly transient identifiers. In practice you simply cannot automate the problem "I forgot my username/password".

(EDIT: Oh, and I misunderstood your comment: no, you cannot have them initiate the request with their username, because they probably also forgot their username. I thought you were saying that they could initiate a request to look up their username before looking up their password, which has the "no stable identifier" problem I ended up going into.)

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