Stefan Brands wrote a post slating OpenID and talking about why his company’s proprietary software is unlikely to ever be OpenID compatible. He raises a few valid points amongst the provocative language. Most his arguments are, in my view, either non-issues, untrue (no list of OpenID consumers) or true of any single sign on system.
I see the valid criticisms of OpenID are:
- Phishing - If users login to a url that’s not theirs (http://spamsite.etc/blah) then they’ll give away their logins (same as PayPal, your bank, or any other site).
- DNS Poison - If a hacker can convince your ISP to send traffic to the wrong server, they can steal your login details (as above, true of all logins).
- Privacy - You need to choose an OpenID provider you can trust, personally, that would mean my own server or not at all.
Overall, I think OpenID is a good thing, and I think it will lead to increased security if it’s widely adopted. Primarily because if your OpenID password is the key to your online life, providers will hopefully force you to look after it better than your Hotmail password!
After talking about member rights on CouchSurfing, I was interested to see this article that Dante forwarded about creating a bill of rights for members of the social web. I’m strongly in favour of outlining exactly what rights users of social networks should have. I’m really pleased to see an increasing level of awareness and discussion on the subject.
I think for social networking to become ubiquitous, users must own their own data, and different systems must be compatible. I believe Email is so widely adopted because it’s a single standard. It doesn’t matter what email client / server / software you use, you can email anyone else on any other system. If social networking is to go the same way, it will need to be similarly standardised.
I’m surprised by the continued success of Feedburner, the popular blog feed stats service. On the one hand, you get a great stats package, offload some traffic from your blog server, and it’s free. However, for those benefits, you give up control of your feed and you give up a share or all of the ad revenue.
With plugins like Google AdSense for Feeds WordPress users can put their own ads into their feeds. With a handful of feed stat plugins around, it must be possible to get all the benefits of FeedBurner without the downsides.
I suppose it’s one of those situations where they’ve “made it” sufficiently that using FeedBurner is the norm. That and they were just acquired by Google, uh oh, the G disease is spreading…
A few people reported problems with the WP Mail SMTP plugin. I’ve resolved a few bugs and added a new feature that allows you to set the From name and email address of all mail sent by the wp_mail() function. I’ve thoroughly tested this version (unlike previous versions, oops!) and I’ve released it for immediate update.
Please note: SMTP authentication does not work in version 0.2, I encourage all users to upgrade immediately.
Amazon S3 is a static file hosting service from Amazon. Storage costs $0.15 USD per Gb and data transfer (outgoing) costs $0.18 USD per GB up to 10TB. As an online backup solution, it would cost less than $20 / month to store 100Gb, assuming you’re not uploading / downloading more than 20% every month.
That’s pretty cheap by backup standards. But for commercial static file hosting, it’s insanely cheap. Particularly given the fact that it will scale from a few GBs today, to several TBs tomorrow.
I currently spend $5.40 / month for 3Gb of online backup with rsync.net. I might consider switching to Amazon S3, although probably not for my daily backups because I get unlimited bandwidth on rsync.net and top notch support. For image archiving on the other hand, it looks very tempting.
The best thing, there’s no minimum spend. You don’t have to commit to spend hundreds of dollars to benefit from enterprise class storage.
I’ve written an article on WordPress Optimisation on the WordPress Codex (Wiki). It covers the general areas where WordPress performance can be improved. I plan to expand on the work with more detailed discussions of the individual areas.
Every time I restarted Fedora the volume would reset to 50% and the mic would be de-selected as the recording source, so VoIP wouldn’t work. I’d have to manually reset these every time I rebooted. Turns out, as with everything Linux, there’s a simple solution! 
You set your desired volume, login as root, then run `alsactl store`. Or line by line (set your desired volume first)…
$ su -
# alsactl store
I should also say, I haven’t actually rebooted yet, so I’m just hoping this will work, it’s as-yet-untested!
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