The Internet today is moving in one strictly defined direction – the direction that techies proudly called the “transition from www to ggg”, which is completely incomprehensible to the layman, as always, will bring both good and bad news. This follows from the fact that today the network penetrates deeper and deeper into our lives: tomorrow it will become as common as a telephone, and it will be possible to access it directly from the TV.
The fool understands that such a spread of any phenomenon entails an inevitable loss of anonymity – it would be illogical to leave just this anonymity. At the same time, this is exactly what attracts you on the Internet, and no one wants to lose it. However, there are already personal assessments of what is good and what is bad – today we use the phone and do not think about it. Approximately the same situation will be tomorrow, when one person with a unique network name will be strictly identified by IP address, and all his moves will be recorded somewhere.
However, today it is too bold to say that it will be tomorrow – most likely, after tomorrow, or even later. In other words, this will not even happen in the next five years, but we need to worry now.
Let’s say right away that nothing of what is happening today will remain in this form until the events described – now there are only hints that seem to be designed to make life easier for a person. OpenID, an informal association of independent servers that provide online identification services, threatens to become one of these systems in the near future. So, if you have an account on Yandex or LiveJournal, you can easily use it on sites that support OpenID – all you need to do is to be logged into your account. You can create your own OpenID server in the same way, or connect to your independent provider to write on your behalf.
However, this is only the external side: to come to the blog to your neighbor and write to him that it’s not good to shit in the entrance, without the need to register, of course, it’s good. However, this is not the main goal of the service – such solutions have as their main goal just to remove the very anonymity, which, when the Internet reaches a certain critical mass of information, becomes a rather harmful factor, because. can easily be misused.
A commonplace example today is spam, which clogs mailboxes and user pages with completely unnecessary information and increases entropy, resulting in emails that do not reach the recipient and a lot of stupid information in the brain of the search engine. With a full-fledged mass launch of a unified identification system, both users will benefit (no need to register on a dozen sites to comment), and publishers (less spam, because the system with “black lists” will be easier to launch).
What we have today is a system so far from ideal that even talking about it seriously as a fait accompli is a shame. Discussions, whether it is needed or not, can be safely left at the mercy of webmasters – there are too many malfunctions in the operation of identification servers, too tedious and dreary procedure for registering with certification authorities, too little has been written about what OpenID is in general. Moreover, people are generally not inclined to trust open sources – where is the guarantee that this information will not be used against you?! In fact, today only “geeks” need it.
After all, by and large, this is an Internet passport (or a driver’s license of an Internet surfer) – a document with a photograph on which honest eyes are visible. It is clear that as passports are forged today, OpenID will be forged tomorrow – however, today the OpenID forgery is meaningful to the same extent that the forgery of the “Earthman’s passport” is justified (a thing completely unnecessary, in the absence of diplomatic relations with aliens). To the same extent, this is necessary, in fact: it is interesting to talk, but there is no real benefit.
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However, since such a stupid fashion has gone, we cannot but pay tribute to it and introduce OpenID support on our website.
By the way, you can read more about this phenomenon:
Description of OpenID on Wikipedia
OpenID project website
A complete list of providers that allow SSO on behalf of OpenID, from which I can recommend GetOpenID, and recommend ClaimID – with their help you can connect such a system to your own site, without having to set up your own identity server
If you don’t have your own website and don’t need it, a Yandex, Google (Bloqspot), Livejournal, WordPress registration record and a couple of hundred more “social” services close to the people are enough
The WordPress OpenID support plugin is terribly buggy, but it doesn’t get any better