Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in Jan, 2007

Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2007 × Month: Jan × Sorted by date


idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID

In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.

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Social whitelisting with OpenID

A key feature of OpenID is that it provides a globally unique identifier for every user, no matter what site or service they are using on the Web.

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Solving the OpenID phishing problem

Most of the arguments I hear against OpenID are based on mis-understandings of the specification, but there is one that can’t be ignored: OpenID is extremely vulnerable to phishing.

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How can my non-tech-savvy Mum maintain her own website?

Here’s a trick I’ve used in the past. Find a simple wiki package (I used Tavi). Install it, twice. Point both installations at the same backend database. Now password protect one of them with .htaccess—that’s the one that gets used to edit her site. Make some simple template modifications to the other one to make it not look like a wiki—remove the edit links (and delete the edit saving code for good measure), configure it to display WikiLinks with spaces in the middle, then add the site’s navigation around the top. This wiki will be the public site.

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Leaving Yahoo!, going freelance

Last Friday was my last day at Yahoo!. I’ve had a fantastic time there, and will really miss working with Tom, Paul and the many other superb Yahoos I’ve had the privilege to meet.

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An OpenID is not an account!

I’m excited to see that OpenID has finally started to gain serious traction outside of the Identity community. Understandably, misconceptions about OpenID continue to crop-up. The one I want to address in this entry is the idea that an OpenID can be used as a replacement for a regular user account.

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More home improvements

I’ve had an offline Christmas, not entirely through choice (broadband at my Dad’s new place in rural France isn’t working yet) but welcome. I did have my laptop with me, and I’m using Bazaar for version control so being offline isn’t a barrier to checking in code. I’ve just rolled out a bunch of new features that I put together over the past few days.

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