Yahoo to embrace OpenID standard for validating users
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Yahoo is opening up its quarter-billion-user database to cross-platform username validation across Web sites with Open ID.
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People with a Yahoo user name and password will be able to use that ID information to access non-Yahoo Web sites that&#160;support the OpenID 2.0 digital identity framework, reducing the amount of different log-in information people need to create, remember and enter online.Already, almost 10,000 Web sites support OpenID, an open framework available for free to end users and Web site operators alike, according to the OpenID Foundation.Yahoo&#39;s move will triple the number of OpenID accounts to 368 million by adding its 248 million active registered users to the rolls, the company said Thursday.OpenID addresses one of several issues related to giving people more control of their online activities. Other groups are focusing on data portability, to let people move around the data and content they create online, so that they don&#39;t have to enter it manually in, say, every social-networking site they sign up for.Yet other initiatives, like Google&#39;s OpenSocial, aim to create standard interfaces so that developers can create applications that run in multiple social-networking sites, instead of having to rewrite the same application multiple times for every site.For all of these initiatives, it&#39;s critical for major Internet players to get involved, so that the benefits of standard technology and methods developed by groups like OpenID can have a real-world impact.Unsurprisingly, in Thursday&#39;s statement, Scott Kveton, the OpenID Foundation&#39;s chairman, hailed Yahoo&#39;s support as a crucial validation of the framework that will help spur its adoption by other large Web site operators.Other major players that have expressed interest and gotten involved in varying degrees with OpenID include Google, Six Apart, AOL, Sun, Novell, and Microsoft.Yahoo&#39;s announcement doesn&#39;t come as a complete surprise, since signs that it had been working on an OpenID implementation had surfaced. For example, a short message in the domain me.yahoo.com indicating the company would act as an identity provider for OpenID was spotted last week.Yahoo participated in the development of version 2.0 of the OpenID framework, which the company said provides new security features. Yahoo users who log in to third-party OpenID sites should know that the log-in process doesn&#39;t reveal e-mail or instant-message addresses, Yahoo said Thursday.Yahoo&#39;s initial OpenID service will be available in public beta on Jan. 30 and the company is working with several partners, including Plaxo, so that the Yahoo ID will work on their sites that day.&#160;
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Solving the 'interoperability puzzle' The European Commission is considering the feasibility of an interoperable electronic identity (eID) system across Europe.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Inc. will soon start to fulfill a promise it made to users several months ago to tie its new Web mail service with its instant messaging application. Starting Monday and continuing over the coming months, Yahoo will activate this feature for users of the new version of Yahoo Mail, which is in beta, or test, phase but available to all users of the service. Yahoo officials demonstrated the integration of the Yahoo Mail beta with Yahoo Messenger in November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The audience reacted enthusiastically to the plan. The new feature alerts Yahoo Mail beta users if their contacts are logged on to Yahoo Messenger and gives them the option of starting a text chat session from within the mail interface. If the user is composing an e-mail message but wants to chat instead, Yahoo Mail can grab the text and paste it into the text chat window. Likewise, the chat session can be automatically imported to an e-mail message form. This integration with Yahoo Messenger is the first of several tie-ups the company plans to implement in the ( Yahoo Mail beta ), because it wants the service to offer multiple communication options to its users, said John Kremer, Yahoo Mail's vice president. Although he declined to confirm future plans, he acknowledged it would make sense to let Yahoo Mail users launch voice conversations and to create links to the company's social networking service, Yahoo 360. Another likely development would be to extend Yahoo Messenger's interoperability with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live Messenger into the Yahoo Mail beta, he said. The beta version, a free service, offers a number of improvements over the current version, including a more agile interface based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that works like a desktop application. The beta was introduced in September 2005. Unlike typical Web mail services, it lets users drag and drop messages into folders, provides a pane to preview messages' content and offers the ability to have multiple message windows open.
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It's certainly a good thing for the grassroots universal-login protocol: one of the Web's biggest names has said that its member information will be compatible at the end of the month.
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Yahoo will unveil SmartAds, which allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user's Internet profile.
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Password complexity be damned Yahoo! has pledged to support OpenID from the end of the month, giving a massive boost for the online identity framework that aims to cut password headaches.â¦
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America Online has declared it will not support the Sender ID antispam technology proposed by Microsoft, instead placing its online might behind SPF, or Sender Policy Framework. The announcement is the second major setback for Microsoft's efforts, following news this week that the IETF standards body would not validate Sender ID due to patent concerns. Meanwhile, Yahoo! is focusing on another standard called DomainKeys, leaving the industry without a consensus on how to block spam.
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Yahoo, in a fierce market battle with Web search leader Google, has rolled out a test version of its search service that helps users personalise results.
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Microsoft throws its weight behind OpenID, an emerging Web authentication standard.
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IBM on Thursday said it has joined the Liberty Alliance, indicating that industry support is shifting toward the identity-management group&#39;s standard for using a single ID and password to access Web services across organizations.
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DomainKeys Identified Mail, a proposed standard for e-mail authentication, would help fight spam and phishing attacks.
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In a new post today, P&aacute;draic Brady takes a look at the OpenID library included in the Zend Framework and his own efforts to create functionality of his own.   Here in the present, everyone I work with is all too aware of OpenID. [...] Enter the Zend Framework. If you've ever looked under the hood of the JanRain PHP-Openid library you'll notice they implement all of this without a single dependency on PEAR or other external classes.   He notes that this application of the "Not Invented Here" method that the Zend Framework follows might not be the best when there are already plenty of libraries out there that help with this exact functionality. He mentions a PEAR class that helps with it, but is written in PHP4 and hasn't quite been optimized.
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Yahoo&#39;s email service has begun to use the company&#39;s DomainKeys authentication technology, almost a year after Yahoo first unveiled this antispam project.
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Yahoo Inc.  is  set to allow outsiders to create new services using the world's  most popular consumer e-mail program, in the broadest move the  Web has yet seen to enlist independent programmers to build a  company's products for it.
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What Yahoo's massive conversion to OpenID last month lacked is a way for Web sites to securely authenticate the users who have signed in. As it turns out, OpenID's directing body may want Microsoft to provide that part.
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Yahoo is making APIs available to developers who want to build applications for its new Panama search ad platform.