The dupe? What?

The what? The dupe? Oh, I get it. Vidoop. And what am I doing? Oh, uh…

Is this thing on?

Well, okay, so I’m George, and if I heard right when I got hired five minutes ago (not true, but it feels like it), it looks like I’m the technical communications intern here (my unemployed friends call me a Synergistic Web 2.0 Blogosphere Professional), and it also looks like I’ll be one of a few people talking to you a lot from now on. So let’s get acquainted.

By day, I’m a student at the University of Tulsa, majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, specializing in computer security (my research focuses on passive network and protocol characterization), but by night, I suppose I’m a technobabble-to-English translator. And by “day”, I mean “spring through fall” and by “night”, I mean “this summer”… But whatever.

In any event, I’m here to create a dialog. I’m here to have a conversation with anyone who’s interested. The people I want to talk to are the ones that I saw lighting up in blogs all over when the product launched last month. Everyone who said “That sounds cool”, everyone who said “I wonder if it…”, and everyone who said “That’s nice, but what about…”: I’m talking to you.

So let’s talk. Let’s talk about the ways you’d hack Vidoop users. Let’s talk about how you’d like to see OpenID move in the future. Let’s talk about anything that’s not clear about the Vidoop technology. Let’s talk about what we’re doing right, and talk about what we’re doing wrong.

I’ll be around, but until next time, I want to hear from you: tell me what you’re thinking, tell me what’s up, and tell me off if you want to. I’m just here to make sure we’re communicating clearly to the Internet, to computer security enthusiasts, and to the world about what we do and what we don’t do.

I’ll be in touch.

-George

4 Responses to “The dupe? What?”

Comments

  1. 2007/05/22 at 11:47 am | Link

    George,
    If a site offers open id sign-in, does it have the ability to restrict to vidoop only or would it have to accept any open id provider, regardless of reputation?

  2. 2007/05/22 at 4:11 pm | Link

    James,

    A site offering OpenID sign-in (called a relying party) is able to pick and choose between the identity providers that it accepts; for example, the MediaWiki OpenID plug-in makes this sort of functionality very easy with blacklists and whitelists.

    However, using OpenID but restricting to only one identity provider violates the spirit of OpenID, as well as cripples its functionality as a web single sign-on. We don’t want to see the future of this protocol that we support put into jeopardy by the actions of relying parties who favor particular providers. Of course, this is different from maintaining a blacklist of known-insecure or known-spammer identity providers, which seems likely to evolve into standard best practice.

    So, while what you’re asking is possible, we can’t recommend it. What we will recommend, however, is referring your visitors who want to register to myVidoop.com.

    Thanks,
    George

  3. 2007/05/24 at 8:12 am | Link

    George,
    Once a user chooses to log in w/ openid and selects vidoop as their provider, do they always get the vidoop-branded site that i see when i log in, or can a relying party skin the log-in and picture identification pages with their own style?
    Thanks for your help!

    David

  4. 2007/05/24 at 9:22 am | Link

    David (Sorry for calling you James!),

    I’m actually about to post about that, but the short answer is that no, at the moment, (but see the affiliate program here), that’s not possible; everyone logging into myVidoop.com for OpenID will get basically the same experience.

    George

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