Identity in the Browser (Firefox)
Aza Raskin,
Feb 03, 2018
(Update) Doug Belshaw wrote me on Mastodon: "Stephen, this Mozilla project you link to in the latest OL Daily is almost a decade old. Aza Raskin left *years* ago, and the work you cite led to the (now defunct) Mozilla Persona."
Longtime readers of OLDaily will remember I created something called mIDm back in 2004. The idea was to put an identifying URL in the browers so I could automatically log into sites. Three days later (literally!) the first proposals for OpenID were released and that's the direction the web went. OpenID was basically replaced by Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which gives us the third party ID system we use today. It is not satisfying. See also: WebID and the W3C WebID Community Group.
As Aza Raskin writes in this post, "Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company. Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company." Mozilla, he writes, has been working on a browser-based alternative (yay!). The full discussion is here. The first draft of the protocol is here. "The browser user requests 'connection' to the site. The browser negotiates account setup, possibly disclosing some personal information about the user, and learns a userid-credential pair. On a subsequent visit, the browser notices that it does not have an active session, and automatically establishes one."
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