Submit Response

SparkStats

Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on and belongs in the web category. The previous post was , and the next post is .

New Improved OpenID

OpenID is getting simple and safer to use by the day.

Last week MyOpenID added a pair of new features to combat ‘phishing’. That’s the trick familiar from those shady emails purporting to be from your bank which ask you to ‘confirm your account details’ on a site that looks just like your usual login page. OpenID is particularly vulnerable to phishing, since it works by taking you away from the site you’re on in order to sign in, which means that folk will get used to quickly entering their details and clicking the ‘Allow’ button without paying close attention to the URL in the address bar.

Now Simon Willison has launched a new service called idproxy.net, which lets you set up an OpenID identity based on your existing Yahoo! account and also includes a fairly strong layer of features to guard against phishermen, on top of Yahoo!’s existing protection.

Nice work. The usefulness of OpenID from a user’s point of view rests on the fact that it potentially frees you from the hassles of mainting squillions1 of accounts for all the different sites you use, but achieves this by… asking you to set up yet another bloody account.

Sorry to keep banging on about this—I’m just rather taken with the speed at which folk involved with OpenID seem to go from raising concerns to suggesting solutions and implementing them.


  1. I just checked in the application I use to store my passwords, and I have 87 different accounts on the web. Skimming the list, I reckon about two thirds of these could safely be replaced by my OpenID.

Posted at 11am on 28/01/07 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us
Tags: ,

Comments are closed

Comments are currently closed on this entry.
  1. That’s Simon Willison, not Williamson :P If you’;re enjoying the sudden surge of OpenID activity, his site is definitely the place to be following.

    Posted by Gary Fleming at 12pm on 28.01.07

  2. Oops, thanks Gary—name now correct.

    Posted by Jack Mottram at 11pm on 28.01.07

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives

Elsewhere

Search