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 [...]
Microsoft released Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 8 during MIX08. They’ve done some exceptional work during the 15+ months since IE7 shipped (passes ACID2 out of the box, implements some neat new JavaScript features, has moved the IE Dev Toolbar developer tools into the browser, and too many other things to list here). My personal [...]
February 20, 2008 – 10:37 pm
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 [...]
February 18, 2008 – 2:59 pm
I have vast amounts of respect for scientists and what they do. They have built an industry that pays them to do fun things like think up new things and argue about the futures of existing things. Interestingly, though, their industry insulates them from some of the pressures that cause non-scientists to do imperfect things [...]
December 21, 2007 – 2:32 pm
One thing I love about working with software is that no matter how much you know, you can still be surprised by tiny little quirks that lurk in every software system. Two great examples from today: Firefox is happy to follow HTTP redirects while trying to fetch an image. IE seems to not be so [...]
November 27, 2007 – 10:58 pm
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 [...]
November 27, 2007 – 10:41 pm
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 [...]
November 7, 2007 – 8:04 pm
I talked to Dr. M. H. Samadzadeh‘s software engineering class at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK today. I’ve posted my slides. If you heard the talk, I’m eager to hear any feedback that you may have.
October 22, 2007 – 5:20 pm
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. [...]
October 21, 2007 – 5:42 pm
I spent Friday and Saturday at the second annual Tulsa Tech Fest, a gathering of IT & software professionals from Tulsa and the surrounding area. Overall, it was a good event. Friday’s attendance was incredible, coming in somewhere around 700 attendees according to some reports. I got a chance to meet and talk to a [...]