[OpenID] Fwd: Excellent critique of OpenID usability

[Greg Hewgill]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 05:57:33AM -0700, Peter Williams wrote:
> Each site shall process credit card trasactions as a merchant, and
> must retain a merchant account with either a visa or mastercard
> acquiring bank, and shall  display the associated logo.

As mentioned before, this has nothing to do with being an identity
provider. Furthermore, the presence of such credit card logos affords
me absolutely no confidence that the organisation behind the web site
is in any way trustworthy. In fact, in some contexts (such as openid)
it may have the opposite effect - if I had heard about this free way of
doing single sign on, I would definitely be turned away if all the
recommended openid providers had to display a credit card logo
(regardless of whether they actually chared money or not - I wouldn't
even get that far).  Virtually nobody will be willing to pay for this
service, and is probably why we haven't heard very much about i-names
recently.

Greg Hewgill
http://hewgill.com