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Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

identity.mozilla.com

31–40 of 207 posts

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#31

the "check the documentation" link goes to https://developer.mozilla.org/it/Persona which 404s for me. Maybe not redirecting based on user location by default is a good idea.

Doh, I'll update the MDN links to go to the en-US locale by default. Sorry about that :(

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#32
Have been messing around with BrowserID since it first went public last year (with a node.js backend) and I love it. Its so much more straightforward to implement than oauth and openid, and the fact that it's tied to your email address is perfect. I'm definitely going to be using it as my primary auth system going forward. Great job Mozilla!

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#33

One reason this looks good to me is that I trust Mozilla more than most organizations.

I don't trust any "organization" to store and manage my passwords. A single subpoena to mozilla for a divorce proceeding or whatever could unleash cascading consequences upon you.

It's not really a "password manager", it uses signed assertions instead of plaintext passwords. It is similar to client certificates, but with a much better UI.

Plus, your keys are stored in the browser, according to callahad, so Mozilla doesn't have to know where you signed up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4232774

Also, in the future you probably won't even need to contact Mozilla anywhere in the process: your browser will store your certificates for you, natively.

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#34

I thought [1] Mozilla Personas were themes? [1] http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/ Evidently I need to pay more attention.

Used to be: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/18038609895/introducing-moz...

Someone needs to make a Persona Persona. We're our own worst SEO enemy :)

The Firefox themes were renamed to... background themes. It's just that the addons team (which owns getpersonas.org) has been hard at work on the new Mozilla Marketplace, and the Persona team has been hard at work on Persona. A few of the Persona devs are going to hack on this next month and try to get a disambiguation page deployed. We don't want theme-seekers to get lost, but we also don't want to lose people looking for the authentication system, so a straight 301 isn't ideal.

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#35
post #5

After reading the text twice and watching both videos i still have no clue what it actually does and how it solves the problem. I'm a few pages of skimming into the documentation now but there's no overview of what it actually does in the background. Just a load of buzzwords and awesomeness!1 of how this will revolutionize my account management and how easy the API is. Is it a password manager, a biometric system or…

It's decentralized public-key based authentication, wrapped up in an extremely user- and dev-friendly package. Francois Marier did a good job of explaining it at Kiwi PyCon 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZBTc7iEkQY (Think OpenID, but easier to use, easier to implement, and with better privacy protection.) In brief: instead of a username and password at login, you get a user's email address and cryptographical…

>No more password column in your database...

Who has liability when a user of mine says their account got hacked? The email provider? My site? Mozilla?

If one of my users has $100 go missing from their account, then they are going to expect me to replace it, not the email provider, not mozilla. I don't like the idea of shifting security to a outside platform, because I still retain all the liability when things go bad, and they always will (key loggers, spyware...)

Sites that deal with financial transactions will be reluctant to adopt this for sure.

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#36

I thought [1] Mozilla Personas were themes? [1] http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/ Evidently I need to pay more attention.

Used to be: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/18038609895/introducing-moz...

I told them that they need to rename it with a 301 several weeks ago. They haven't. sigh

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#37
Are there any websites with implementations that don't prompt directly for Mozilla's site(i.e. asking for your preferred BrowserID provider)? I'd like to see how clunky the interface becomes when there are more providers(such as if I want to become my own provider) than just Mozilla. Is the user then confused by asking for a provider..ala OpenID? Am I correct in presuming Persona is an implementation of BrowserID?

I'm not likely to use this myself as this little gem from Mozilla's privacy policy (https://login.persona.org/privacy) gives me the shivers: "As part of the normal operation of the Persona service, Mozilla will retain a log of which sites you have disclosed your email to."

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#38
post #5

After reading the text twice and watching both videos i still have no clue what it actually does and how it solves the problem. I'm a few pages of skimming into the documentation now but there's no overview of what it actually does in the background. Just a load of buzzwords and awesomeness!1 of how this will revolutionize my account management and how easy the API is. Is it a password manager, a biometric system or…

The original name, "Browser ID", made it clearer.

Basically, your browser knows your identity, so it can automatically authenticate you with any supporting website. You never have to set up an account with the website and you never have to enter a password.

That's my understanding of it anyway.

Re: Announcing the First Beta Release of Persona

#40
post #39

Interesting changes to the API. We now have an observer API, instead of just a function that invokes the login window. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/navigator.id I believe this merges the old BrowserID Session Management parts with Persona, or am I wrong?

Yep! The Observer API does session management automatically. (Some folks don't want that, so the previous `.get()` API is still available.)
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