Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass (YC summer 07) | Hacker News Reader

Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass (YC summer 07)

techcrunch.com

87 pointsimmad37 comments

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We are on Disqus, news.yc and plaxo at the moment.

If you want to skip the intermediate pages, http://disqus.com/login and https://www.plaxo.com/signin :)

I'm still waiting for arclanguage.org...

Since Drew was cheeky enough to ask.

digg/reddit love :)

http://digg.com/tech_news/Bringing_OpenID_To_The_Masses_Clic...

http://reddit.com/info/6bofr/comments/

I can't seem to get this to work on news.yc, at least with my self-hosted OpenID (http://openid.dfranke.us). I go through my portal and then the Clickpass portal and get redirected back to a news.yc closure URL, but it just gives me a blank page and doesn't log me in.

I just found a workaround and fixed it. Sorry for the delay

>Naturally some concerns arise with any centralized login system. Doesn’t this mean a thief only has to steal one password, your Clickpass password?

Clickpass with two-factor security (e.g. SecureID) might be worth paying a subscription fee for

Seems to me now that the HN post yesterday on Techcrunch was more of a preparation to announce Clickpass and lure more TC users on its service.

Nice one-two movement.

I assume you're joking, but in case you're not: it was a coincidence. We didn't ask to be TechCrunched.

It was just an observation. I think it is even better that it was a coincidence. As the saying goes: "the harder you work, the luckier you get".

But even if it wasn't, I couldn't say that there was something unethical or shady about it. Sorry if it seemed that I was implying something like that. It was far from my intention.

TC has always been very kind to YC and its startups. They seem to take the view that startups are going to have a hard enough time without their first media appearance ripping them apart over the usual early startup pains and problems. TC readers that comment, on the other hand, are like a more vicious and less literate TMZ that somehow views startups profiled at TC as "the other half" who don't have to work for a living. Not entirely relevant to this thread, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how nice the TC folks are in print and in person, and they're enthusiastic about the whole YC concept.

Thanks for the nice comments guys, we're really excited. Total coincidence about the Techcrunch mention but incredibly lucky too as it rooted out a bug that would have slowed Clickpass to a halt today. Sometimes you just get lucky!

For me, the whole idea of openID is flawed from the start. Why would I want one point of failure? Why would I want to use the same login details for every site I go to? That's kind of a very bad idea.

Sorry, but the whole openID thing seems like tech people making tech things that they think are technically impressive. Rather than things that are useful or solve problems for the average Joe.

There are enough password reminder/generator addons/programs etc, and most browsers have such functionality these days.

Am I missing something?

1. 99% of people use the same login details on every site they go to anyways. That's not likely to change. For those people OpenID is actually more secure, since their password is only ever exposed to one site.

2. Your email address is already a single point of failure for any sites with a "Forgot my password" function.

IMO an OP can be made secure enough that the benefits of OpenID outweigh the severity of a possible breach (at least for non-critical transactions).

Good points. So I guess the challenge is either to convince users that OpenID gives them some advantage to just using their same old login details, or convince website owners that it is a good idea. I guess we'll see how it works out...

And it works with news.yc.

Actually, it didn't for me. I click on "log in", then click the Clickpass drop-down, type in my own OpenID, it goes through to MyOpenID and verified that.

Then it takes me to the "merge with your existing Hacker News account", and I type my correct username/password, but then I get redirected back to News.YC and a blank page at something like http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=j3tO1pS8ox

A friend of mine had this same issue

hmm, I see what the problem is.

My apologies, arc is a tricky language :). I am going to fix it and hopefully pg will be able to push it soon.

It works if you are logged in to Clickpass btw. But it was a mistake, gonna fix it :)

I just found a workaround and fixed it. Sorry for the delay

Congrats! Clickpass is going to be big.

I can't seem to get my news.yc username linked up to my OpenID. I login to my OpenID provider, then get to the point where I enter my news.yc username and password, but then it takes me to a blank page on news.yc. :(

Looks like logging in with the AOL OpenID provider doesn't work on news.yc. I don't know if this is a news.yc bug or AOL OpenID bug.

Clickpass feels more like a single-sign-on service, wasn't the purpose of OpenID to negate this? Or am I missing something here?

Hi Spif. Clickpass is a single-sign-on service. It's built on the OpenID protocol.

Thanks, I did get that part :-) I'm wondering though why this would be a success where MS passport failed. Because it's not evil? Is usability the only left that hampers uptake of openID?

The Microsoft Passport solution was proprietary, heavy-weight, required a licence to use and was over-engineered. It had a pretty good user experience but it was Microsoft and it was also difficult and expensive to install.

OpenID is decentralised, open-source, free and does one and pretty much only one thing very well. It may not win but historically those have been shown to be really good traits for success.

Well I haven't had an OpenID until now.

Here's what I think you're saying: A feature of OpenID is that, unlike passport, there is more than one ID provider. With Clickpass, although you can use a generic OpenID the normal way, it works best if you have a Clickpass account.

That's a pretty good description Alex. We've tried to minimise the feature set and whilst we've made sure that people can use their own OpenID if they want to we figure most users won't. If it turns out that they do we'll switch to making it an automatic feature.

Peter Nixey: The UK's prodigal son, no? Congratulations to Clickpass. Looks like a good service.

great writeup -- congrats peter and immad!

How do YC companies get on TC so easily?

Because Michael Arrington is in love with Paul Graham.

It's a secret affair, of course.

They're good ;)

Great stuff, way to go Peter and Immad!

I like it. Congrats guys.

this is gonna lead to a lot of dumb old ladies sending you spam because they gave away their password. Can't wait!!!

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