Randall Stross on OpenID

In yesterday's Times, Randall Stross wrote an excellent piece about how archaic -- and how silly -- our current password-based logon systems are.

 

THE best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some admirable people actually do memorize random strings of characters for their passwords — and replace them with other random strings every couple of months.

 

Then there’s the rest of us, selecting the short, the familiar and the easiest to remember. And holding onto it forever.

I once felt ashamed about failing to follow best practices for password selection — but no more. Computer security experts say that choosing hard-to-guess passwords ultimately brings little security protection. Passwords won’t keep us safe from identity theft, no matter how clever we are in choosing them.

 

He discusses a new initative called OpenID, that allows you to use a single login on many websites.

Neopoet is currently OpenID compatible, thought it doesn't seem very popular at the moment.

Take a look at the article. Is this something you would use? Or do you prefer to have a seperate identity on different sites? If so, why?