Perhaps I am just pessimistic.. Actually I am and on-top of that there is sarcastic, nihilistic, dismissive and all number of other negative descriptors but in this specific case of distrust I never had any faith in an Open Source universal log-in system built to take on Microsoft Passport. Who could? Such concepts are only ever spurred by idealistic hippies with no funding or solid recourse in event of. .. Of this.

I did sign up for OpenID with Videntity.org who at the time looked the most promising amongst the flotilla of rusting and ebbing services under the paper umbrella that the OpenID is. I signed up, thankfully, just to access ONE page on ONE service and as such the loss is not exactly devastating, what it is though is solid reassurance that faith placed in the hands of these capricious pushers will usually end. Not with anything in particular, just end.

Proper services do not get by on a wing and a prayer simply because you need at least two functional wings to fly and a prayer indicates toward no ability to act alone but a tendency to beg for the help of something that is not there anyway. Am I getting too metaphorical yet? OpenID as a system for logging into multiple services on-line is as keeping vital information safe by writing it amongst clouds with a sky-writing aeroplane, hoping that the dispersal of the smoke into the sky is actually an advanced form of steganography. Later employing a “psychic” to retrieve said information and pass it onto your bank in your name for the promise of a palm crossed with silver.

It’s not that I do not like Open Source programs because really I do not like anything very much at all but there is a sound difference between an application that loses support yet continues to function upon the system installed and a service that has to be up and running every hour of every day for the user base to rely on it. Using OpenID as a login to your service in this current disorganised state is just a very poor idea.

Microsoft Passport might be flawed but it is backed by something far more useful than good intentions, fucking great piles of money and the refusal to fail.

I think that will do.