Hosting With Hostgator
May 19, 2007
Up until recently my hosting was provided by Fasthosts. For reasons that have nothing to do with the experience I have had with Fasthosts I have had to move to an alternative hosting provider. After some research I opted to go with Hostgator’s Baby plan. The features included with this hosting plan are excellent for the small fee of £5.00 per month. And the technical support is brilliant. I initially had problems getting SSH access, but after raising the issue via the ticket system, I had SSH access within a few emails!
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OpenID: Decentralised User-Centric Identity Management
February 21, 2007
We sign up to more and more services online every day. This often involves remembering multiple, often similar (in the case of username1984, user_name_84 etc) usernames and passwords. A solution to this is so called single-sign on, whereby you use only a single identity such as a Microsoft Passport or a Yahoo! username. The problem with this solution is that you can find yourself tied in to one large company’s services.
If you already have a Microsoft Passport, you are unlikely to want to create a Yahoo! account to use their services as this would involve going through a sign up process, replicating friends lists and so on from one provider to the other etc. Besides, I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t like the idea of some large company controlling my identity: storing my username; hashed password and other details. It would be better if I could arbitrarily choose who controlled my identity, or even better, control it myself. This is where OpenID comes in.
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