[TOS] Wiki cleanup status report

[MJ Ray]

tosmaillist.neophyte_rep at ordinaryamerican.net asked:
> Does OpenID not represent a single point of failure for all my login
> credentials if I use it?

No. If your OpenID provider fails, you can redelegate your web page
to another provider.  That's why you should delegate from your page
to a provider with tags like
<link rel="openid.server" href="whateverURL" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="whateverURL" />
rather than use the provider-supplied URL directly.  Of course,
most people already trust Google/Yahoo/AOL/... not to fail, so
won't do that.

> Does OpenID not represent a beginning point for the aggregation of my
> participation in Internet communities?

Only if you want it to be.  You could use a different ID on different
sites if you like, with or without using the same provider.

> I don't like Unsolicited Commercial Email, also known as SPAM, but I
> don't want my authentication credentials easily disabled nor used to
> track my activity (part of my past employment included some
> professional paranoia, also known as security administration).

Your current authentication credentials can be disabled easily.  This
is not a problem introduced by OpenID use: it just changes a bit.  For
someone who is good at security administrtion, you can use OpenID to
improve the security of your account, like sending your auth info over
HTTPS even where the site you're logging into isn't using it.

> If you implement OpenID, please also preserve existing account credentials.

Of course, I've no objection to that.  It would be nice to see
every OpenID-using site also being able to serve OpenID.

Hope that informs,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/