[Sigia-l] Google to take social networking to a new level

[James Aylett]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 02:00:13PM -0400, Ziya Oz wrote:

> > OpenID (http://openid.net/) - would not only make personal data
> > portable, but also has the advantage of  allowing users to
> > maintain more control/ownership of their personal  data.
> 
> I haven't studied OpenID in detail. But from my initial observation, while
> it sounds lightweight and distributed, it doesn't sound like its security
> aspects are that robust.

Depends what you're trying to do. I haven't studied it in great
detail, but its very lightweight aspect lends itself to layering,
which has generally proven popular in security design.

Although I haven't put the time into really looking through it, a
number a people smarter than me who I trust on these matters are using
it, and promoting using it in the mainstream.

> Relative simplicity of email protocols, for example, led to its
> explosive growth, but ended up costing us untold billions in so many
> ways later on due their sloppy and inadequate definitions.

Now, now. The definitions of email were generally pretty good - you
must be thinking of Usenet ;-). The problems with email have arisen
largely from the absence of end-to-end verification, authentication
and authorisation, which is a missing feature set rather than a
problem resulting from sloppy and inadequate definitions.

(You want sloppy and inadequate definitions, go to RSS 2.0 and cower,
and scream, and tear your hair out.)

James

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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org