OpenID

I'm a happy new user of http://myopenid.com.

• Registration was very simple
• The OpenID urls you get are nice (yourchoice.myopenid.com)
• It supports multiple personas, i.e. during the signon process, you can choose differents sets of personal information to share with the requesting site
• You get a detailed account activity report

Out of laziness, I've been resisting for years to get a proper OpenID account. Sometimes I've been using the one provided with blogger.com; others, my Flickr photostream url. And then sometimes I've signed up to places using my google or twitter accounts. In fact, a site requesting access to my list of contacts during registration with my google account has been the trigger to take care of this.

Two html lines have allowed me to use a vanity url (http://els.verg.es/xavier) and to avoid getting married to myopenid.com

My bank's money and my identity

Hilarious and insightful radio sketch (2 minutes) by Mitchell and Webb on identity theft

via Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram

My story about you

From Bob Blakley's On The Absurdity of "Owning One's Identity":

There are lots of versions of your identity out there, but we'll lump them into two broad categories: your reputation (the story others tell about you), and your self-image (the story you tell about yourself).
(...)
Your reputation is my story about you. You can't own this by definition; as soon as you own it, it's no longer my story about you; it instantly becomes an autobiography instead of a reputation.
(...)
In principle, controlling the information that makes up your self-image seems easy - you just choose what you tell to whom, and under what conditions. (...) You value your privacy, of course, but you also value other things, like the ability to get a credit card and the ability to travel on airplanes. (...) You have a choice between getting a credit and controlling information about yourself - if you want the credit, you have to give up information somebody else chooses, and you have to do it on somebody else's terms.

I learned about Ceci n'est pas un Bob when he recently left ibm. Good reading if you are interested in identity, privacy, security and risk; and everyone should have at least a mild interest in them. Although I confess that I often skip Bob Blakley and Bruce Schneier when checking my feeds; as Calvin says (*), "Reality continues to ruin my life", and I often don't feel like having my life ruined by their uncomfortable reality reports.

(*) It is always a good thing to keep Calvin and Hobbes quotes at hand.

(Post written while trying to cope with the huge frustration of seeing someone spreading a false and damaging story about me. Yuk.)