To be accurate, partner Shell choose not to re-up its investment after exactly one year, from 2019 Feb 12 to 2020 Feb 18 as indicated in the blog post you linked (actually https://link.medium.com/KBxNNZGcK9 since your link didn’t work for me). It seems unfair to blame Alphabet solely, or even Larry, as one comment below did.
To mention only Wirecard misses a wider scandal and the “massive hack-for-hire“ India-based operation BellTrox with hundreds of clients, as documented by CitizenLab.
“Simple browsers” (#2), i think, has already been solved. Take http://Shiira.jp/en.php or Safari on the iPhone. The larger problem is how to make mass audiences aware without mass advertising, or to make it affordable to those without income. Seeing this problem under the lens of getting computer and media illiterates to open their minds, or employing the permanently unemployed, better reframes the challenge.
As we know, hackers regularly turn random door knobs to see which doors open. Logs i can see show more black hat attempts than white hat, so either OldGregg's friend got lucky or a few exploits might have already been made.
The weakness of the above argument: Why would site-owners install an untrusted Clickpass widget spread around the net but not from Clickpass itself?
I can see how some users might fail to recognize a Clickpass or OpenID url and give their login credentials to a fraudulent site, but no worse than password management, OpenID requires folks be on guard against phishing.
In the cat and mouse game between site owners and spammers, data on recent Ma.gnolia registrations showed an overwhelming number of spammers have begun using automated tools to proxy Captcha and create traditional address and password logins. For now, OpenID encumbers them by requiring presumably more valuable credentials.
As a website owner, OpenID nets your site security. Most people reuse the same small set of usernames and passwords. A not-so-small number of sites store cleartext passwords; they can even mail it back to you. Regardless how well you execute security, a breach at any of these sites compromises security across many user accounts across many sites.
Several weeks ago a Web 2.0 company launched a Gmail backup app that asked for addresses and passwords, which at least 1777 unwitting folks provided. In addition to backing up Gmail as expected, the app also socked away the address and password combo. When the scheme was exposed, the company said debugging code inadvertently made it to production. http://codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001072.html
I can see scenarios where the government may be the least of our worries. Much more likely are significant others' jealous exes who are also system administrators, and other real or potential enemies. The sooner we move away from passwords and other shared-secret systems, the safer we'll be.
America Online + AIM, Yahoo, Flickr, Livejournal, Vox, Typepad/key, Google, and enough widely-used sites, plus Drupal, Wordpress, and other widely-used platforms provide OpenID that very few users would need to create yet another login/password. Those already with many logins would likely already have multiple identity providers from which to choose. Those with few logins would presumably have less of an issue.
Instead of merely having a home, why not incorporate it as a non-profit cooperative. The paperwork isn't very hard. We've done it from scratch here at the http://Ant-Hill.org in Rochester. The effort to found a developer/start-up co-op then goes on to sustain yet more start-ups. A co-op/social venture would grow independently and foster others, and even help sustain your venture in a positive feedback cycle too.
Perhaps even more important than diversity in gender, diversity in age and experience contribute even more to a project. So long as people are bright and hard-working, they can contribute lots. In the technology world, age prejudice runs more rampant than gender prejudice.
I don't know how you could say that. If anything, the article calls for the demise of walled gardens:
“Early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as ‘walled gardens’ before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning.
“‘E-mail…is the most important social network’… because the extended inbox contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections.”
Without pressure to make it a business, e mail “can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users…but [traditional e mail] can let users minimise what they share.”
Built by the folks at http://FriendFeed.com Simpli.st makes and manages lists. It aims for simplicity and requires no login. Each list gets a new link for sharing and linkmarking (social bookmarking). I like it combined with the Del.icio.us Firefox add-on and “Live Bookmark” feeds of selected tags back into Firefox. Combining these two simple tools makes an even more flexible and powerful tool for managing lists.