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Microsoft Opens Up Windows Live ID
randommsdev writes "Microsoft has announced the release of Windows Live ID Web Authentication. This means that WLID (formerly known as Passport) is now opened to third party websites to use as their authentication system. Any Windows Live user can potentially log in to a website that implements Web Authentication. Interestingly sample implementations are available in the Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP open source languages amongst others — tested on openSUSE 10.2 but expected to work on any platform that supports these languages. More details are available in the SDK documentation."
Google and Yahoo have both been offering similar services for awhile now, I believe, and I don't remember hearing either of them having this problem. Not to say it couldn't happen, but I imagine they've thought about this situation and have accounted for it somehow.
Is it just me, or does placing this article directly above the Diebold rebranding article make you think of a theme common to both? Company loses credibility. Keeps trying to regain it, but still doesn't grok that you can't just make it *look* like you've changed your spots. You actually have to change your behavior, and regaining credibility takes a lot longer than destroying it does.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I use 3 passwords for all sites I access mapping to 3 levels of trust. I try to use the same user id when possible :
Level 1 : risky
Level 2 : less risky
Level 3 : almost trustable
For sites that I really trust (banking, etc...) I use dedicated passwords. I, also, can forecast problems with a single sign-on scheme that would be more or less like giving away your social security number if hacked.
I have been working on this problematic before for big organizations and one conclusion we came up with was that we needed to re-use the old assembly language "indirection" principle, called pointers in higher level languages.
So basically, one has to be able to authenticate with multiples set of usernames/passwords combinations. Once the unique user is authenticated, the central authentication authority limits its role to just that, authenticating the user.
All authorization is managed by the local system that interacts with the user.
Do a search for MBUN on Google. In Canada, a user can have multiple MBUNs to deal with the government. This solution was implemented to cope with privacy concerns and still allow the citizen to deal with the government with the same level of privacy that was previously achieved with paper forms. Basically, what has been done is creating a mapping between the MBUN and the real userid and the choice has been given the citizen to have as many MBUN as he wishes to deal with the government.
Serious concerns should apply to too simplistic solutions ;-)
Now for all /. MS bashers to enjoy : Although a qualified partner in the project, none of MS products where used to implement the solution. Given the money and the visibility at stakes, this caused a commotion in Canada with MS canadian VP putting pressure on everybody to reverse the decision.
Hey Sam, your products are just too simplistic and too proprietary. Phone us next year please ;-) That was really funny, the guy just couldn't understand that Macdonald's like marketing techniques did not work in this case. I mean, they even flew us for a week to Redmond at the campus to try to brainwash us, but still no go for MS.
-ls
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
You forgot the part about keeping a sharply-peeled eye and making sure you are being served by live.com and not 1ive.com (with a numeral 1).
It is just sad to read the Python implementation of this functionality. Almost nothing is written according to the Python Style Guide. Weird "__foo"-variables can be found, then it's not Python2.3 compliant because of ONE silly "staticmethod", many "getters" and "setters" which are just useless in this script. If MS wants to show their code to the scripting community, they should at least make it pretty and according to the language's coding standards. But maybe that is their understanding of "pretty". Who knows.