Screen shot from the nominations page for the current OpenID Foundation board elections. I’ve always thought that OpenID identifiers need to be human readable because they are likely to be printed in places like this one. Can you spot the identifier that’s just not as helpful as the others? ;-) I have erased some information…

Traditionally, a state diagram (aka state-event model) of authentication on the web is very simple. It has only two states: Anonymous and Authenticated. A user’s session moves from Anonymous to Authenticated upon successful presentation of valid credentials (such as a password). It moves back to Anonymous if the user logs out, or after the user’s…

A somewhat problematic picture has been floating around recently depicting the so-called “Open Stack”: There is just one problem with it: the dependencies are all wrong. For example, OpenID does not depend on OAuth; both depend on XRDS-Simple, however. That means the stack isn’t actually a stack and perhaps a lot more confusing than it…

And the accusations are flying. Kaliya today announced that the representatives of the Identity Commons in the Liberty Alliance-initiated talks about a new, joint identity organization are withdrawing. She said: We (Mary, Kaliya, Drummond) do not believe the proposed organization accomplishes the goals Identity Commons was formed to achieve. We do not see how we…

Just about everybody seem to be complaining that there aren’t enough sites where one use those hundreds of millions of OpenIDs. (Known as "relying parties" in the jargon.) And there is no denying, it’s a lot easier these days to get an OpenID than to use it. There are conflicting views on how many OpenID…