On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 7:37 PM, Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com wrote:

Sebastian Moleski wrote:

...

I understand *what* people want to do with it. What I don't understand is *why. What benefit does OpenID provide over just registering with your usual user name and password at any site?

Besides the advantages others have cited (improved security, usability, etc.) OpenID offers the best way to give liquidity to the credentials I have earned as a Wikipedia editor. It would be relatively easy for any website to confirm I am an expert in pre-vertebrate paleontology, for example, by cross-referencing my user id with my edit history. The only missing ingredient is being able to confirm that when I come to a site claiming to be User:XYZ I am in fact User:XYZ .

There must be some balance, so you can have a account "semi anonymous". Because some people want this anonymity, and other people *need* it.

Seems some people have forget his mother advice about "Don't talk to strangers!". The internet store all your comments, so using your real name can result on a really bad idea. A malicious guy can know everything about you, and you nothing about him. He can call your real phone at 4:00 am, and say "You sister Mary is in comma in hospital San Francis, come here FAST". Then steal all your stuff from your house. You chose how much of your real information you leak to the internet. But If you use your real name, is easy for a stranger to collect all data, and use it against you. And, what if a know pedophile poster is also a pre-vertebrate paleontology expert?, do you want a "moral filter", that make harder for evil people to contribute to the society, because are bad people?. What If you want to get hired, and your future employee reads your political/religious comments on a blog and disagree?, so you don't get hired, and you have no idea why.

Stuff like a universal login, may make a "semi anonymous" use of internet harder. And using your real name on the Internet is a really bad idea.

-- ℱin del ℳensaje.