DD Shift

I am hearing the song “Love Kills” by the Circle Jerks. Yes, this is part of my former-day teen-angst song list. And, it was in the movie “Feds“. One of my students actually has a t-shirt that says this on it.

I followed a Youtube link that Kelley Connolly recommended about How to Use OpenId. The introduction to OpenId is very easy to follow, and the concept seems very practical. From there, I also watched a presentation on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt which was very interesting. He was presenting about the same issues that I have recently identified in my blog about over-bloggedness. In the end he identifies a number of other options to OpenId and during the course of the presentation he identifies why Passport (Microsoft’s original attempt at universal, single signon) didn’t work.

I think that I am ready to try the OpenId. I do have concerns about security. The concept seems simple. You log into one site and then you use that login in several sites. At the different sites that support OpenId you have the option to use your OpenId user name. You enter that and are taken to your OpenId site, you tell the OpenId site that you want to allow this application to access your credentials, and then you are in.

I have four concerns:

1. How does this work on public terminals? When does my OpenId login session end? Does it vary from OpenId to OpenId provider? Or, is there a standard that is enforced? What do I need to know as a user to protect myself?
2. In transmitting data from the OpenId provider to the other, is it transfered with at least https?
3. As a school IT administrator, do I host my own OpenId service? Or, do I rely on one of the providers that are out there? How, as an educator, do I ensure that my students and their data is “safe” if I go with an external provider? Admittedly, using an external provider would be less administrative overhead for me.
4. Is OpenId here to stay? I looked at the OpenId site, and they have a page dedicated to listing all of the sites that use OpenId. There are currently over 10,000.

This entry was posted on 2008-06-21 at 23:52 and is filed under Collaboration. Tagged: Blogging Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.