Any of you lot out there aware of OpenID?

How many different username and passwords for different sites do you have?  How many of those actually have the same password, which is a big security no no?

So, openid is a set to helping to sort that, allowing you to control your 'login id' and manage it from where you chose.  If you want to learn more about it, have a look at:  openid.net

Aaanyway, if you've ploughed through that and fancy having a go, I've got some good news!

Colin, the developer behind stitching the community site together has been playing with an openid implementation.   This means that if you have a community site account, you also have an openid you can use.   Your openid will be: openid.beta.plus.net/?user=<username> where you replace <username> with your own username.  Want to try it out?  Go to livejournal and try logging in using their OpenID interface.  It will redirect you to our site and ask for your community site password to authenticate you.

This is obviously very experimental (hence alpha!).  Once we are done, you'll have a much nicer url (i.e. mine would be kelly.openid.plus.net or similar) and the screens would be prettier.  We've got some other nice ideas for features.

If you have your own domain name you want use, with a tiny bit of html you can use that instead.  Add the following to the head section of your web page:
replacing <your open id> as appropriate.  This means you'll then be able to use your website url as your id.  Clever huh?

Anyway, feel free to comment on here all the problems you find with this, and we expect you to find lots!

  Hi Kelly,

This is cool and a great idea.

Just put it to the test. I logged in initially with the Plusnet openid as you first suggested, worked no problem. Then inserted the html into my website and logged in with my own website url.... Bingo it worked.

Will this add greater security to a username and password.
If I have to login on a site what benifit is it to login with my url when i'm taken to a page where I have to enter a username and password anyway.

Am I missing something. I think a lot of people will be asking the same question.   

  OK Kelly, sorry,

Spent a bit more time on the openid site and read a bit more. Starting to understand it now.

For those of you out there like myself who just rush into things..... take a bit more time and read the How it works section on the openid site.

http://openid.net/about.bml

 

hehe.  Cool

The concept is in it's infancy, but we need enhance it to fulfil security/spam/phishing prevention needs.  We are looking at doing two part auth with it, which should make it a lot more secure and phish free!

Just bumping this.  Has anyone else tried to use it?  I've been using it on Basecamp and it's worked.  it isn't saving my preferences though so I have to allow access every time.

I've had a little play with it a while ago, and keep on meaning to come back to it.  Will see if I can spend some more time looking at it soon.

Phil

PlusNet providing OpenID seems a little silly to me, assuming that if I ever switched ISPs for whatever reason I wouldn't be able to authenticate to all the sites I visit with my plusnet OpenID any more. I could use my own domain to point to the OpenID provider i'm using, but if I could save my preferences on my plusnet openid I wouldn't want to have to go and do all this again somewhere else really... sounds like it's defeating the whole point a little.

Having said that if plusnet did provide customers with OpenIDs that they could still keep and used if they left/migrated/whatever then it'd be pretty hot!

OpenID is great and I think that Verisign are going to be a provider to keep an eye on, especially considering verisign are behind things like the security key which ebay/paypal are trialing in a few countries.

It'd be cool if you could use your secure key you got from paypal to logon with your verisign OpenID, because there's nothing dictating to the provider *how* they authenticate you, to any site that supports OpenID!

(BTW, if you do have an OpenID why not go over to Jyte and have a look around)

Not working for me I'm afraid - "Invalid Account Information"

Used the ID and login for this site, as described, but no joy

Can't think of any reason it wouldn't work if you kept a Free Dialup Account.  Unless PlusNet choose to restrict it.

Kelly how do I update my Password?

Doesn't it use your forum password Gary?

Anyway, I'd forgotton about this, but now it's come to the fore because it's obvious we should be offering it - I'm convinced OpenID will take off this year... I can also confirm, from a product perspective, this is something we would want to allow people to keep even with just a free / community account (Watch this space!).

PS - There's a good video (Google Tech Talk) on OpenID here.

Ian
 

Yes it is a good video I found it interesting, a direct link to the page is here, with out the Google page header.   

[Edit]

To get rid of the Google page header click on Collapse Frame, watt is on the Google page header.   

Great video!

Is this still running?

I fail at the first hurdle with a 'URL Fetch Error'