So how many password do you have? Or, more importantly perhaps, how many sites do you log in to?
If you’re reading this the answer is most probably “lots”.
But how can we re-engineer the increasing burden of the many different sets of usernames & passwords we must manage? The answer, obviously, is for someone to invent a centralised, secure & authoritative infrastructure for controling identity verification… and luckily… they have… welcome OpenID!
OpenID is an “open source” system / standard, which is both free and widely supported, allowing you to maintain one “identity” and use it with many websites / web apps. Notable providers of OpenID include; BBC, Google, IBM, MySpace, PayPal, VeriSign, WordPress, Orange and Yahoo!, amongst others. Users of OpenID are too numerable to list, but include over a billion users and some 9 million + websites.
So, stop the rot of you’re ever increasing set of usernames & passwords & start using an OpenID, chances are, specially if you already use one of the above sites, you’ve already got one!
If you haven’t yet got one, or if you’d like a neutral, third-party, one I can recommend myopenid.com who provide the leading, independent, OpenID hosting service. Once setup with them you can use your URI to login to OpenID sites (Basically your “myopenid.com” “profile” URI becomes your username; “bobsmith.myopenid.com” and your password will be requested by myopenid.com itself when signing into any sites that support OpenID (if you are not already logged in to myopenid.com that is, in which case you would login to them automatically)).
So why not get yourself an OpenID and support this excellent evolution in Internet authentication!