il maestro ignoto

Take Simon Willison of http://simonwillison.net, get him interested, nay excited about a new technology OpenID and BAM we have this
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7463164786703060643

A short screencast which does a brilliant job of explaining what OpenID is, how it works and what you gain by owning and using one.

While he doesn’t say why content providers and websites builders should add support for OpenID to their sites, it shouldn’t be difficult to see why from watching the video. His site contains lots more information and this technorati link show the latest blog entries on the subject.

.. petition the Prime Minister to Stop proposed restrictions regarding photography in public places.

People who know me will know that I am not a flag waving, card carrying fanatic who will jump at any opportunity to protest the latest real or perceived injustice being metted out by whosoever is the guy at the helm.

No I leave that to the other me (more on him later).

This doesn’t mean that I don’t harbour passionate feelings about the liberties being threatened. Au contraire mon amie, I do. I just believe more in the abilities of the individual to persuade another than the mob’s ability to do so.

Good Judgement comes into play here too.
Lawmakers know that there are some things that will never be accepted by the people and in attempting to pass such laws they are really testing the public consciousness - a very important barometer for measuring the state of governance.

This is why I ignore a lot of the obviously stupid things the penpushers of Westminster try to impose on us (no offence guys, I will continue to
use Westminster Station for interchange, to frequent your pubs and fine eateries and I expect not to get lynched. OK?)

On the otherhand, an attempt to prevent ME taking pictures in public places borders on stupidity.

No, not “borders”, IT IS downright stupid! STUPID!! (slowly unclenches teeth, releases choker grip on laptop and reaches for hot scalding tea while searching for a target - unaware of the impending danger, David James strolls towards angry otu.)

Please, if you have ever seen anything your like here then sign here, initial here and rant about it to anyone who will listen until Aug 14th, 2007

There’s been a lot of noise in the ether recently about OpenID.

BarcampLondon2 saw quite a few sessions and lots of interests in them. In the week preceding that, Microsoft announced support for OpenID and AOL sneakily turned all their AOL user accounts into OpenIDs (I love genius - even when it’s evil genius). Simon Willison has been talking about it for quite a while now and at FOWA London presented a session about using OpenID for your webapps. He had slides which I will link to when they become available within the next few weeks.

Nic Ferrier, a hacker and demi-god I have the good fortune of knowing personally has just released a new OpenID server. ProoveMe

Yeah, yeah, what makes his so special?

Nic uses SSL Certificates generated and installed on your browser when you register at or login to prooveme
for authentication. Two immediate benefits.

1) SSL Certificates prove STRONG authentication. Need I say more?

2) You don’t get redirected to your OpenID provider when your try to login to a site¹.

This is ingenius although it does have a few criticism from me.

What happens when I loan my laptop to a friend, say to browse the internet at a conference while I talk (I do this a lot)?

Problem: My friend, having access to my browser can access all my pre-authenticated sites as me. Bad Friend!

Reality: I have a guest account on all machines I touch for this reason so it’s unlike to happen, but not everyone is as wary as I am.

It’s well worth a look and Nic’s happy to hear criticisms, so drop him a note if you think there’s a problem with his implementation.

Whatever happens, we have collectively decided that we don’t want to manage multiple usernames and passwords anymore - that’s why we had the blasted computers in the first place. OpenID solves the Problem, but will it win the race for dominance? This remains an important question.

[1] Being taken away, no matter how short the departure is and even with the promise of being brought back is a big attention killer and was one of the annoying things I had with OpenID.

1. Let’s all meet, 2. Let’s all meet, 3. Let’s all meet, 4. Let’s all meet, 5. Break, 6. Morning Session, 7. RDF + Semantic Web, 8. Tom Morris, 9. RDF + Semantic Web, 10. basement talk, 11. James Shi, 12. Ian Forester and Natalie Downe, 13. Lister + Simon, 14. Lister + Simon, 15. Simon Liu, 16. Simon Liu

I finally got round to uploading all the pictures (yes all) at BarCampLondon (Feb 17-18th, 2007)
You can click the mosaic to go through to the set or search for the tag barcamplondon2 to find them
and loads more.

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