You use passwords, possibly dozens of passwords, to authenticate to websites daily. Passwords are a useful authentication tool because they function as a “thing-you-know” (a shared secret between you and the server) and because passwords can be changed (in case of loss, unlike say, your fingerprints).
In a diatribe against OpenID titled, “Goodbye, Passwords. [...]
OpenID has been generating a lot of buzz this past month: OpenID is a decentralized authentication mechanism that allows a consuming web-site to verify that “you” can authenticate to a particular identity provider (keyed by a URL). Big names from AOL to SmugMug to WordPress have recently announced that they are being OpenID providers.
Why so many providers? For [...]
