31–40 of 101 posts
I am not sanguine on the idea, but the marketing for the idea is beyond terrible. The IDL is a leaky abstraction because the most salient features of drivers licenses are a) you have to apply to the government to get one, b) the government can take yours away with as much ease as they can do anything else, and c) if you lose your license, you will be denied the ability to use one or more critical goods/services (driv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can be fully in control of your own OpenID if you want. Just host it on your own domain/server. Or even easier: use delegation. Add some meta tags to the header of your blog (or any HTML page under your control), and sign up for sites using your blog URL as your OpenId. See an example at my domain (the content is currently blank, but the meta tags are in the source code): http://jmh.id.au I can sign up anywhere b…
I have multiple problems with this answer. The first is practical: you are not qualified to run OpenID on your server. Really, you're not. I'm not and I have actually implemented both OpenID providers and Relying Parties for clients before, at the old day job. If you run OpenID, you are exposed to every threat your OpenID provider is currently vulnerable to in perpetuity , unless you make it your mission in life to s…
Phishing attacks could definitely be a big potential problem. I'd be interested in seeing how much of the phishing and usability problems could be solved via good browser support for OpenId.
Every hyped technological product has a a short window in which to dominate, and if it does not, it will remain confined to a nice. That's the case with OpenID. It's over, the battle is lost. Same goes for RSS, DRMed music, Django, etc.
The coding horror guys made a poor technological decision. Instead of just giving up, they are doubling down on it. That's not very clever.
It's the login-password pairs which are inconvenient (and, a lot of time, insecure) part out there. So, logically, the straight answer seem to be to get rid of this part in favor of something more usable, users can possess to prove their identities. For example, improving browser support for public-key crypto and key storage (think HTML5 element). However, world has gone in a completely different direction, created "identity providers", who now actually possess users' identities (so you don't own your identity anymore), and, as a result, introduced more failure points to the auth process.
OpenID is neat and convenient when done right, but it was just a protocol invented to sign comments at other persons' blogs. It was never meant for personal identity management and architecturally lacks a lot of important points for that. XRIs may be considered some sort of solution for that (I-numbers are guaranteed to be persistent), but still feel somehow wrong.
I am not sanguine on the idea, but the marketing for the idea is beyond terrible. The IDL is a leaky abstraction because the most salient features of drivers licenses are a) you have to apply to the government to get one, b) the government can take yours away with as much ease as they can do anything else, and c) if you lose your license, you will be denied the ability to use one or more critical goods/services (driv…
Perhaps a more accurate metaphore would be "Internet Passport". Government's can't take it away and it has no real entitlements. However Jeff Atwood is from the USA which has a strangley low number of passport holders. Perhaps they are used to using a driving licence instead of passport as general ID.
No perhaps about it. It seems to the average American, the word "drivers license" evokes "proof of identity" first and "proof of ability to drive a car" second, because they're using theirs as a general ID more often than for its original purpose.
It gets even funnier when American companies operate abroad and require "two photo IDs" in countries where everyone has a government-provided ID card.
You really have to be behind the times to still be advocating OpenID. Technology is made up of alternatives, and one wins. No matter how much you love something, if it's dead, it's dead, now move on. Every hyped technological product has a a short window in which to dominate, and if it does not, it will remain confined to a nice. That's the case with OpenID. It's over, the battle is lost. Same goes for RSS, DRMed mus…
It takes private companies w/ consumer interests in mind to achieve that sort of global scale and user adoption. In this case, namely Facebook.
I am not sanguine on the idea, but the marketing for the idea is beyond terrible. The IDL is a leaky abstraction because the most salient features of drivers licenses are a) you have to apply to the government to get one, b) the government can take yours away with as much ease as they can do anything else, and c) if you lose your license, you will be denied the ability to use one or more critical goods/services (driv…
That, and the concept of the driver's license as the definitive ID document is quasi exclusively and strongly connoted as a funny US peculiarity.
Much to my delight, we canceled the silly project to issue government ID cards.
I am not sanguine on the idea, but the marketing for the idea is beyond terrible. The IDL is a leaky abstraction because the most salient features of drivers licenses are a) you have to apply to the government to get one, b) the government can take yours away with as much ease as they can do anything else, and c) if you lose your license, you will be denied the ability to use one or more critical goods/services (driv…
Perhaps a more accurate metaphore would be "Internet Passport". Government's can't take it away and it has no real entitlements. However Jeff Atwood is from the USA which has a strangley low number of passport holders. Perhaps they are used to using a driving licence instead of passport as general ID.
I am not sanguine on the idea, but the marketing for the idea is beyond terrible. The IDL is a leaky abstraction because the most salient features of drivers licenses are a) you have to apply to the government to get one, b) the government can take yours away with as much ease as they can do anything else, and c) if you lose your license, you will be denied the ability to use one or more critical goods/services (driv…
That, and the concept of the driver's license as the definitive ID document is quasi exclusively and strongly connoted as a funny US peculiarity.