theory vs. reality (why is openid b0rken?)

So I’m reading Val Henson’s blog entry about paying $14.95 for ffm on osx, and I feel the urge to make a witty insightful comment (as if I could make any other type of comment even if I tried).

Val disabled anonymous commenting — fair ’nuff. Hrm, I don’t want to create a LiveJournal account just to make a comment… Oooh! I can login with an OpenID — yay! Finally the big players on the intarwebs are starting to play nice and fix one of the most annoying things on the intertron, namely creating fifteen gazillion throwaway usernames and passwords for every site you might want to access. OpenID is the great idea that will solve all that right? Now you get to choose which $MEGACORP you get to sell your soul (and all your data) to — Google or Yahoo or whatever — and all the other $MEGACORPS can go screw themselves, they’re not gonna get your data, right?

Right!

Um, not quite:

Damn you, LiveJournal! Can’t you see? “Yahoo! only supports OpenID 2.0 because it is more secure.” IT IS MORE SECURE!.

More secure than what?

THERE IS NO MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Oh, ok. I guess I’ll just wait for LiveJournal to get with it and support a protocol that is “more secure”.

I guess I may as well use this opportunity to make my awesome witty insightful comment, that being, I too, hate the shareware culture so prevalent in the Mac community. Does the author of “mondomouse” really think that the audience who knows what ffm is (aka X refugees on osx) is really going to be willing to pay $15 for some closed source kernel module? Dude, that’s like 3 lattes from Starbucks, and you only got 3 and 1/2 mice from Macworld to boot! No thanks.

One of the things I dream about doing in my Copious Spare Time ™ is writing GPL replacements for all the silly Mac shareware out there, except I don’t want to learn obj-c, and I can’t figure out how to get compensated for my time…

On the plus side, this little web 2.0 adventure led me to discover that Google Contacts API has landed. Yay!

Time to go write a shim to get mutt talking to Google Contacts appropriately. After it’s done, you can have it too, for the low low price of $9.95 upfront and $0.001 per contact lookup for perpetuity.