OpenID

The 404 729: Where Stupid Andy is The 404's Nerd of the Year (podcast)

Kenley is back on The 404 today to announce the winner of our Nerd of the Year contest, and Stupid Andy is the victor!

Stupid Andy is a closet geek, so even though you might mistake him for a regular guy, he's well versed in audio/visual languages which I think puts him in the category of nerd, according to this article comparing the two.

Time has announced its Person of the Year for 2010, and although Justin Bieber, the Chilean miners, and the Tea Party all came close, Mark Zuckerberg clinched the title of the person who Time describes as "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

With Zuckerberg in the cockpit, Facebook has changed the way we communicate and consume news, but we have to question whether the release of "The Social Network" had anything to do with the nomination.

Plenty of Gawker accounts were compromised as a result of last weekend's Gnosis breach, and we learn on today's show that even some of our fellow CNET colleagues were affected by the hack! 

We also take a look at a graph of the top 50 Gawker Media passwords that are now posted online for public consumption. Clearly people just don't care about their commenting passwords on the site, because the first 10 are all lazy keyboard strokes  like "123456," "abc123," and "qwerty." On the stranger side, "monkey," "consumer," "superman," and just the number "0" were all identified as popular passwords.

In the face of disaster, the smart thing to do is adapt and move on, so check out this Lifehacker guide to reassessing your online security measures. The page suggests using a free password manager called LastPass that generates complex passwords for you, stores them on a network, and even audits them to make sure they're not easy to guess.

Narcs around the world have been waiting for a Big Brother app for the iPhone, and now it's here. It's called the PatriotApp, and it deputizes any iPhone user (pending a 99-cent fee) with the ability to report a number of crimes directly to the appropriate governmental agency. It links your iPhone to organizations like the FBI, the EPA, and the CDC so you can report things like government waste, environmental crimes, white-collar crimes, and public health concerns on the fly, but it just seems like a professional tool to snitch on your neighbor. Finally, you can also use the app to post your claims to Twitter and Facebook, so all your friends can be aware of your citizen's arrests.

Remember Daniel, our friend who visited The 404 studio last March? He left us this video voice mail telling us about the current fashion trends blanketing his middle school. Congratulations on your graduation, buddy--be sure to tell all your new high school friends about The 404!

Episode 729 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Webware 100 winner: OpenID

Site: OpenID.net Category: Infrastructure & Storage

OpenID is a solution for the log-in problem of having multiple identities online. With OpenID, you create one master identity online at a site you use a lot and tend to remain logged into--for instance, a social network or your personal blog. When you need to identify yourself to another new site, you point that site toward your main identity-providing site where you're already logged in. Your main site sends the new site your log-in credentials, so the new site now knows who you are.

In theory, if OpenID was adopted on … Read more

OpenID comes to Facebook, at last

For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity" without actually building support for it.

Now, the massive social network--once famous for its ultra-walled-garden approach to data and user experience--announced Monday that it has become an OpenID "relying party," which basically means that it's started, at last, to deploy support for the standard. Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, even though many considered its Facebook Connect log-in standard to be a proprietary competitor.… Read more

Webware Radar: Earn a master's in social media

Birmingham City University, a college in the U.K., will start offering a degree in social media, the Telegraph is reporting. According to the report, the course will delve into "what people can do on Facebook and Twitter." The course will also help students learn more about blogs, podcasts, and other social activities. Upon successful completion of the course, students will earn a master's degree in social media.

Venture capitalist firm Charles River Ventures announced Monday that its partners have raised $320 million for its 14th fund, Charles River Partnership XIV. The company will use that funding … Read more

Podcast: MySpace promotes OpenID

At a Tuesday afternoon panel at the Demo conference, representatives of MySpace, Google, Facebook, and Plaxo explained how they are working to create a more open environment so that people can take their identity with them as they migrate from one social-networking site to another.

While we're not yet about to see Facebook let people log on to its site with their MySpace ID, or vice versa, we are starting to see more cooperation among sites. MySpace ID product lead Max Engel speaks with Larry Magid about MySpace's efforts, including collaboration with AOL.

Webware Radar: More customization on Google's AdSense

Google announced Friday that AdSense users will now be able to change the font face of the text in its ad units. According to the company's AdSense engineers, users will be able to choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana in their ads, but they will only be applied to units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

To customize the ad units, AdSense users will need to visit the "Ad Display Preference" section in their Account settings and select the custom font they want to use for their ad. Once they pick that font, they can update their … Read more

Facebook steps into OpenID Foundation

Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit later this month, according to a post on the social network's developer blog.

This is a bit of a surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, Facebook Connect, which theoretically competes with the nonprofit OpenID standard. It should be noted that Facebook has not yet announced any official plans to make the two compatible, and that just joining the board and hosting an event might not quell the criticism from open-source advocates who say Facebook is still too proprietary in … Read more

Daily Tidbits: PayPal jumps on OpenID bandwagon, joins board

The OpenID Foundation announced Wednesday that it has added PayPal as a corporate member of the board. Andrew Nash, PayPal's senior director of information risk management, joins the board, which is populated by representatives from Google, IBM, and Microsoft, among others. According to Nash, PayPal elected to become part of the OpenID board because "open standards-based user-centric identity is clearly becoming an increasingly important part of the evolving web infrastructure" and his company believes it can add to OpenID's desire to bring more security to the Web.

HealthCentral, a site that provides a collection of condition-specific … Read more

Memo to OpenID: Keep it simple, please

With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, it's worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?

The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama's Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool.

But it wasn't until Facebook Connect started making headlines that … Read more