PUBLIC MARKS with tags openid & online

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use the same account to log in to multiple sites and applications, without having to trust them all with your password? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could do this without having to hand ownership of your online identity over to some monolithic third party? (I’m looking at you, .NET Passport Microsoft Passport Windows Live ID.) The good news is, you can! OpenID is a decentralised authentication system invented by LiveJournal but now being developed as an open standard under the careful mentorship of the Apache Software Foundation. Anyone can create an OpenID, and the number of sites which let you log in with one is growing by the day.