Distributed authentication

Today I realized that I am still not registered at Spread Firefox. That is a shock and shame. I immideately went there and got myself an account and a sweet looking button on the bottom of the right panel. I am now an official promoter of Mozilla Firefox. Although I had probably converted a billion times more people by just talking to them than by placing a button on this site, but anyway…

While creating an account, I read about distributed authentication. The “billion sites – billion accounts” problem is old with the web and there were several alternatives to solve it. Microsoft Passport was the most famous, but I think its as dead as Elvis these days. I’ve never heard of Drupel way of solving the problem, so I thought maybe I just post a link so you guys get the idea about it too.

In short: Drupel is an open source CMS, which among other things, supports communications between installed instances for username/password verification. So, basically, one person can get a single account at any Drupel-based website and than use this account to login to any other Druperl-based website. Sweet!

Luckily or unluckily (which is a total other question) not all sites are Drupel-based. That doesn’t mean that everyone else is out of the game. Since the system is open sourced, other sites can be made to suppor the protocol. The protocol is, by the way, XML-RPC, HTTP POST, or SOAP based as mentioned on one of the sites above.

Overall, I find it to be an excellent idea. Hopefully it will gain some weight in the near future, so that I could use a single account on most of the websites out there.

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