I just spent 30 minutes buying plane tickets on a well-known travel website. Selecting the right tickets took less than 2 minutes. Logging in and making the actual purchase took the other 28. This included, among other things, trying the 43 different possible username/password combinations I might have used, trying to retrieve my password via email, getting frustrated and giving up and creating a new account, getting irritated at the restrictions on what I can make my username (which is, I presume, the reason I forgot what username I used the first time), finally creating an account with a username I'm almost guaranteed to forget by the next time, and which is now unlinked from my existing travel history, and FINALLY buying a ticket.
(And that doesn't count the 5 minutes spent writing this rant!)
And, really, the only reason I was even able to create a new account at all is that I have multiple email addresses. Folks with only one email address would simply have been told, no, you can't do that, there's already an account associated with that email address. Continue with the guessing game. Neener neener.
Why?
Why can't there be a decent authentication architecture that doesn't take lengthy how-to's to explain how to use them? And Sam's is one of the best howto's out there on this topic, and it's STILL way too complicated for normal people to use. My mom is one of the most tech-savvy people I know, of her generation, and I"m reasonably certain that she would be confused by the end of the second paragraph. I can follow the article through, but I'm just not sure I can be bothered - it's way too complicated, and it's not widely enough supported to be worth the effort.
Yes, I know that this is a difficult problem. Quite frankly, I don't care. There are really smart people in the world, and the first time I heard a talk about this problem at a tech conference was more than 5 years ago. Surely SOMEONE can solve this problem?!
It's simply absurd that 15 years into this WWW thing I still have to create a new account EVERY time I want to buy a plane ticket, simply because there's absolutely no way I'm going to remember the 12 accounts I've already created.
Sam's post describes how to take control of OpenID, which is hardly required in most cases; the only thing your mom would need to do to use OpenID is remember to put www.flickr.com/users/richsmom in the OpenID login box (plus some sort of education to prevent phishing) and continue.
This is feasible right now.
I had no idea that was the case. Thanks for that information.
Two points:
- The internet is run by geeks. The world is populated by humans. The two camps often have difficulty understanding each other. Sigh.
But if you offered OpenID authentication, I'd be shane.curcuru.name - how's that for simple?
- In this primarily capitalistic world, money gets things done. Until there's a widespread, already adopted by the users with $$$ system for logins, everyone's going to have their own. Part of this is because most businesses go for the quick buck by trying to lock you in. The rest is becase... there isn't a really widespread single name login yet.
OpenID - or a derivative of it - seems like worthy contender. Someday. I thought Sam's instructions were great, although they could definitely use updating to put them all together (there was an updated post for the newer version of phpMyID).
There's another solution. It's called Mac OS X's Keychain. Wonderful thing, that...
Cameron,
I'm unable to guess what you mean by that. How does the Mac OS X Keychain help me in this situation?
keychain keeps all the user ID's and passwords you type in on different web sites and remembers them for you.
as long as you use the same browser, and don't switch hardware you are fine.
There is a product called seatbelt (https://pip.verisignlabs.com/seatbelt.do ) that you (and your mum) should look at. you put your openID url into it, and it recognizes when a site requires it and does all the hard work for you.
The Keychain stores all you usernames and passwords, for all the websites, for all your mail accounts, instant messaging accounts, across apps and services. It's a lifesaver :)
Obviously I'm still missing something. I don't see any way to either enter that information into the keyring, or extract it from there. Does it require that I use Safari to use this feature?
Sorry, I totally forgot about this thread.
I use camino. It works just like Firefox's password remember on windows, except it's system wide.