[PROGRAMMING] OpenID

[jducoeur]

Those who are paying more attention to, eg, Slashdot will have seen this already, but for those who aren't: I just stumbled across OpenID, a very new initiative of the LJ folks that is looking like it might take off rather suddenly. It's a very pragmatic design for doing common authentication in a distributed way. Basically, it's an open-source attempt to cut Microsoft's Passport off at the knees, so your single "identity" can be used across the Web. It's relatively simple, and intentionally unambitious: it's trying to solve one longstanding problem well, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

LJ seems to be moving forward with this pretty rapidly, and it sounds like a lot of people are thinking about implementing it soon. (Based on the profusion of Google references to it over the past week.) Given that it's relatively simple and open-source, I could easily see this moving from prototype to de rigeur within a year...

Comments

This is offtopic

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

but I know you play games.... and are probably familiar with this and would get a kick out of it..

And while I first thought this was a joke site... I have been told its an actual site... So for all those who know about INWO from Steve jackson... Have a chilling laugh.


I was pointed here:

http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1753.cfm

by a message on a forum that joked that now we knew how Steve Jackson was going to take over the world.

These guys take cards from INWO to "prove" that there is an Illuminati Conspiracy - because the game was produced in 1995 and "foretold" the events of 9/11/01

Re: This is offtopic

[jducoeur]

Poor Steve Jackson. The price of being reasonably insightful about politics is that he gets no end of this stuff. I still remember the Feds raiding him because of the Cyberpunk game -- it was a turning-point for the Net.

Yeah, it's probably real -- certainly, it reads like a typical conspiracy nutjob site. It's amusing, but I do wish these folks had some sense of social history. Nothing on those cards (including the 9/11 attack) was a real surprise to those who had been paying attention: all of it had been theorized for years.

It's a little unsettling to have it all pointed out, though, because Jackson was mostly presenting a whole lot of worst-case scenarios in those cards, and a frightening lot of them have come true...

Re: This is offtopic

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

Well it is real./ I perused it..

Scary stuff.

I had sent you another link off it to freemason shit... Boy they slam you. (you are a mason if I rmember correctly...?) but I have discovered my email for you is old and no good anymore. Got anew one you can email to me?

If you are int he mood to either be scared or laugh... like me and the Wicca stuff... go back to the home page and link over to the Freemason archives...

Re: This is offtopic

[jducoeur]

Oh, sure -- *everybody* slams the Masons. It's not really surprising: we're the longest-running private society in the world, AFAIK, so obviously running everything. (And in fact, most secret societies, both secular and religious, can be traced back to the Masons. Even a fair bit of modern neopaganism is descended from it, albeit indirectly.) There's nothing terribly new here: anti-Masonic screeds have been around for *centuries*, and they all feed on each other. This looks like a fairly typical mixture of truth and nonsense.

Anyway, anything at waks dot org will get to us. Choose some sensible address and it'll work...