OpenID, verisign, and my life: mediawiki, bugzilla, mailman, roundup, ...
Please, don't ask me to manage another password! In fact, how about getting rid of most of the ones I already manage?
- For the ESW wiki, there's MoinMoin support for OpenID
- For the microformats wiki, there's media wiki support for OpenID
- For CSAIL mailing lists there's mailman support for OpenID
- For W3C qa tools bugs, there's a patch to bugzilla
- For this breadcrumbs site, there's drupal support for OpenID
I have sent support requests for some of these; the response was understandable, if disappointing: when debian/ubuntu supports it, or at least when the core MailMain/mediawiki guys support it, we'll give it a try. I opened Issue 18: OpenID support in roundup too; there are good OpenID libraries in python, after all.
A nice thing about OpenID is that the service provider doesn't have to manage passwords either. I was thinking about where my OpenID password(s) should live, and I realized the answer is: nowhere. If we put the key fingerprint in the OpenID persona URL, I can build an OpenID server does public key challenge-response authentication and doesn't store any passwords at all.
As I sat down to tinker with that idea, I rememberd the verisign labs openid service and gave it a try. Boy, it's nice! They use the user-chosen photo anti-phishing trick and provide nice audit trails. So it will probably be quite a while before I feel the need to code my own OpenID server.
I'm still hoping for mac keychain support for OpenID. Meanwhile, has anybody seen a nice gnome applet for keeping the state of my ssh-agent credentials and my CSAIL kerberos credentials visible?