Category Archives: OpenID

The need for wiki standardization

Selection paralysis I got to thinking lately about how I wish I had a wiki on my personal web site, because I want to do some quick’n’dirty semi-structured and richly linked writing to share with others so I can get feedback and input. I spent some time catching up on what wiki systems are best [...]

Simple solutions to stupid password policies

Roy Leban blogs about stupid password policies over at his thisUser blog. I’ve got some good news for Roy and his readers: I’m currently making a living turning all of the things that he rants about into relics of the unenlightened past. And while I have to concede that it’s a slow uphill climb, there [...]

The trust screen on an OpenID Provider

Nathan Bell blogs about how he wishes OpenID would just go away, or at least fade into the background so that users don’t have to know quite so much to use it. I really like how he’s thinking over there, and will take some time to write up my thoughts on most of it sometime [...]

Universal OpenID Button

Following Clickpass‘s lead, there are 3 key scenarios that a Universal OpenID Button needs to enable in order to gain widespread use on the web: 1) new user sign up, 2) existing user sign in, and 3) merge existing Identity 1.0 user with a new or existing OpenID user. Despite the existing best practices for [...]

Heading off button proliferation in OpenID

The great OpenID usability work that Clickpass recently launched and the reactions that followed have induced me to spend some time thinking about what this all means for OpenID. The first conclusion that I reach is that Clickpass-style single-click single sign-on is almost inevitably the future of OpenID–it makes it trivially simple for even the [...]

Vidoop, the military, and national ID cards

Marshall Kirkpatrick’s claim that Vidoop is “a company made up largely of engineers with military backgrounds” makes for a great thriller plot, especially in the context of his National ID discussion over at ReadWriteWeb. That description, however, doesn’t reflect the Vidoop that I know. One of our developers was a civilian researcher at the Naval [...]

OpenID concern #2: switching providers

One thing that concerns many people about OpenID is what happens if their provider goes out of business or if they want to switch to another provider for some other reason. At Vidoop, we believe that users deserve to always be in control of their online identity, even if it means that they’d like to [...]

Crazy OpenID authentication schemes

I love some of the kookier OpenID authentication schemes that are out there. Here’re a few examples of what I mean: http://www.jkg.in/openid/ — Does not do authentication at all. Anyone can claim any URL as their own. I call it "OpenID with null authentication". http://openid.xmpp.za.net/ — Sends a message to your Jabber (XMPP) account to [...]

OpenID concern #1: forgotten OpenID

There are just short of 1.3 zillion OpenID concerns out there (no, seriosly–I counted), most of them well-intentioned but overblown. And most of them are just as applicable to username and password. The biggest difference is that everyone has experience with username and password and knows all of the best practices for dealing with them. [...]