eBay Retires MS Passport Sign-In

fihzy writes "eBay have announced they will retire Microsoft Passport Sign-In and .NET alerts. The Microsoft Passport Directory of Sites has been discontinued, too. Is Microsoft's Single Sign-On vision edging towards oblivion?"

Comments

Good idea, bad implementation

[prostoalex]

The idea is not that bad - instead of thousands of sites and message boards requiring registration, login and confirmation of the e-mail, have just one single entity provide and verify the virtual avatar.

As a Webmkaster, I would like to have some simple authentication solution, so that the users dont have to register in forums and what not to post. However, the implementation is just unacceptable:

There are two fees for licensing Passport: a periodic compliance testing fee of $1,500 US and a yearly provisioning fee of $10,000 US. The provisioning fee is charged on a per-company basis.

Small sites who would benefit frim such service don't have $10,000 to throw around, and large sites, which do have the money, just will write their own username+password code.

Bad idea, implementation irrelevant.

[Tackhead]

> The idea is not that bad - instead of thousands of sites and message boards requiring registration, login and confirmation of the e-mail, have just one single entity provide and verify the virtual avatar.

Bad idea, implementation irrelevant.

Instead of having to compromise each site (presumably on a semi-secure server), have just one single entity provide and verify the virutal avatar... based on data resident on a machine administered so incompetently as to have six types of spyware and four spammer worms on it because the underlying operating system is as secure as swiss cheese.

> Small sites who would benefit frim such service don't have $10,000 to throw around, and large sites, which do have the money, just will write their own username+password code.

...thereby saving themselves $10K, thereby limiting the damage from compromise to Just One Site, and thereby offering better security to the end user by accident.

I've lucky in that got a good "mind" for (secure!) passwords and have no trouble remembering dozens of them.

But even if I didnt... even if I wrote all my userid/password combinations on Post-It notes, a Post-It note resides in an area with reasonably secure physical access controls. Not so with a network-connected PC and a single-signon application.

One account for EVERYTHING... no thanks!

[turrican]

The thought of a single web-based logon for access to so many different entities kinda scares me... Especially once it spans across companies.

It's sometimes irritating to remember a number of different logons/passwords, and maybe I'm just paranoid, but I prefer the compartmentalization that separate logons brings.

Re:Edging into oblivion?

[killjoe]

Although MS has suffered from a lot of spectacular failures latelly, anything they do is in danger of becoming main stream. A monopoly on the desktop and office software is a tremendous weapon to wield against the rest of the world.