If you’re anything like me (wait, that’s not an insult!) you live a busy life online. You have a multitude of registrations and user IDs and passwords for many sites on the net. There are many ways to manage this inherent mess with different trade offs between convenience and security.
One methods that I came across recently is using an Open ID (here’s the Wikipedia page.) I first saw this when leaving a comment on a Blogger weblog. I noticed that one of the authentication methods it supported was a single URL, and the caption read “Open ID”.
Well, suffice it to say that after a couple of hours I had my own personal Open ID provider up and running, using phpMyID. Even if you don’t have an Internet-reachable box at your disposal, you can use one of the free ID providers (listed on the above pages.)
I’m yet to investigate the security of the whole system in depth, but it seems well enough. In the least, it let’s me be in charge of my own security instead of some random web site.
But such a scheme does not work if it’s not adopted, not by users, but mainly by software developers. As a developer, I’m going to consider giving the users of my next web-based application (if I ever develop such an application again) the option of logging in using their Open ID. I hope others do so as well.
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