I posted a comment on EugeneEricKim’s blog about single sign-on and related issues. ¹ Basically I am not very enthusiastic about it.
Here’s what I wrote:
The reason not too many people think about it is because these discussions often seem to be dominated by architecture astronauts resulting in bloated overengineered concepts. That’s what I think, anyway. Because really, what does it mean if you give a little piece of paper with your name on it to somebody else? It means: “Here’s a name, here’s a means to contact me, I’d like to talk to you.” It doesn’t promise that the name on the paper is the name of the person, that the phone works, that the person giving the paper is honest, there’s no contracts, no uniqueness of names, no resolvability – nothing. Just a name. From my point of view, it seems a lot like a wiki with no logins. So I think a lot more thought should be spent on figuring out what we would need single sign-on for. Do we want to sign-on at all? Do we really want global identifiers, some sort of internet security number? I haven’t talked to anybody else who is as sceptic about these issues as I am, so I guess I’m in the same dilemma as you are, I don’t know why many people don’t care. I only know that I don’t care enough to get involved.
I really need to find a way to better keep track of conversations using blogs. My current system sucks. I rarely go back to those odd blogs where I post comments to read replies. That’s so sad.
#Web