[OpenID] Proving your OpenID to foreign domain

[SitG Admin]

>OpenID will give me a URL that represents that user, but not contain
>the actual username. Is this being worked on or looked into?

In general, that sort of thing is left up to the particular foreign 
domain implementing OpenID; were you specifically looking for an 
answer from YouTube?

>I understand why the URL is not required to be the username,

If you're thinking "Because the numeric ID may be a user's primary 
key for their entry within the database, and the alphanumeric string 
never in danger of collisions with identical alphanumeric strings 
from different accounts because the username is never used as a 
primary key.", then, yes, I can understand too :)

>but I
>believe OpenID should provide a simple way of saying, "You requested
>proof of ownership for 'john.doe at youtube.com', and yes, the user is
>the owner".

A slightly different way of phrasing it, "You requested proof of 
ownership for 'john.doe at youtube.com', and yes, I am the owner", may 
still carry different implications; in UCI-land, the *user* has a 
simple interface where they can choose to assert ownership of their 
URL+username or merely to having an account at YouTube - or, to 
abandon those UCI principles, users are merely (carriers for their) 
security tokens, allowing foreign domains to request that sites share 
information they have on accounts by username.

If sites begin openly sharing information by exploiting the users and 
their browsers, privacy-valuing individuals may retaliate by 
modifying their browsers to isolate sessions between sites. (Come to 
think of it, Firefox already does this with some extensions; one that 
limits cookies comes to mind.) If sites begin trying to detect this 
by looking at such clues as IP address, more browser modifications 
may begin routing all traffic through various darknets by destination 
domain, challenging those of us who profess to be concerned about 
identity collisions to either be more intelligent about it or write 
them all off as a loss for their insistence on not playing by the 
rules ;)

-Shade