Government taking a page out of Blizzard's playbook

[The Man]

Yeah there's no way this will possibly go wrong. None at all.

(For those who don't get the title, see here).

[Ensign Steve]

I love the idea, in theory, for the convenience. Despite my libertarian leanings I care fuck-all for online privacy, mostly because I figure it's a lost cause in the first place. But, having served in the military and now working at a public university, I really just don't see it happening.

In the Air Force I had about a trillion different accounts for things like leave, payroll, email, etc. It was so out of control that they had to make the "Air Force Portal" where you could access all those things at once with one log-in. Except for the things that it didn't support, such as DOD-wide applications or all the army stuff I had to access since I served on an army base. Oh, but don't worry, we have "Portals" for those, as well. I had at least 3 portal accounts at any given time. And now that I'm out, do you think my VA accounts tie into any of that stuff? Nope, and I have like 3 different VA accounts, one for disability, one for GI bill, and one for straight medical.

Meanwhile at work I'm both a staff member and a student, and lord help me if I ever want to change my name again. I have a single ID for logging into (almost) everything at work and school, which is kind of a bitch because there's a lot of bleed over where there really shouldn't be, and yet any single change I make does not propagate across the whole system. So I get all of the hassle with none of the benefit of a single log-in.

I think it would be great if I thought they could actually pull it off, but I doubt they will. Which means it will just be yet another log-in for me to remember, adding to the problem that it is trying to solve.

[Adam]

One possible advantage of a government endorsed standard is that it might encourage developers to converge on that single standard, instead of having an ass ton of them, leading to the situation where even SSO portals don't actually provide, you know, a SSO.

[lisarea]

Ewwww. I don't trust 'voluntary' participation proposals. I mean, I don't give a shit if it were to remain voluntary and limited purpose, but you know what else was all limited purpose when they introduced it? Social security numbers. They promised those would only be used to manage your social security account and would never be used for anything else.

It seems like it's all about convenience, but is it really worth it when you lose the benefits of security through obscurity and compartmentalization? My concern is that people will support this because it says it's voluntary, and it'll become a de facto standard, and then an official standard somewhere down the road, so that YET AGAIN, lazy stupid fucks will end up establishing the standard, and eventually, you won't be able to reasonably opt out without opting out of a whole lot of other, integral things.

And do not underestimate the value of these obscurity and compartmentalizing. Sure, someone could do a whole bunch of detective work and locate all or most of my existing online accounts under different user names and stuff, and then tie that all into my actual identity, but it would take a fair amount of time and effort as things currently stand. So yeah, that information is available, but it's available the same way that 'public information' that those shit people finding aggregation sites is. It was available before, but you had to put a little work into it, rather than just autoretrieving it from one central location. (You know, hypothetically, if the information were accurate.)

And just personally, I am deeply and profoundly skeeved out by the trend toward universal oversharing. It's creepy and weird. My grocery store doesn't need to know what music I listen to, and my plumber doesn't have any reason to see pictures of my dog. If you want to know something about someone, fucking ask. If you need some subset of information to complete a transaction, fucking ask for that specific information. You don't need to get access to some central repository of information about a person. You only need a subset of that, and you should only have access to that subset. If people want to pathologically overshare every little personal detail of their lives with every single person they encounter, they can go ahead and do that manually. Some people actually have personal boundaries.

And realistically, no way would that be secure. If something like that were widely adopted, and all that personal information were aggregated under one account somewhere, bad guys would concentrate all of their efforts on getting into that. And if it were implemented all over the place, there would be weak links EVERYWHERE. That stuff would be out in the wild in no time.

It just seems like overkill to propose such a huge behemoth solution to avoid small inconveniences like, you know, getting a password manager or something.

[Jug Pilot]

In 1992, we all used our real names on the internet. Handles were considered childish or Top Gun wantabe’s. Before that on Compuserve, AoL and Prodigy we used real names. Back then though it was 99% computer nerds who thought “we’re going to make the world a better place” not comprehending the world has a lot of evil in it. When the masses started using the internet, the crazy’s came with them. That’s when I got my first death threats here at home. Not because I out debated someone on a board, simply because I wrote a piece of software that worked and helped others.

When it comes to using real names or pictures of you or your family, there is one thing we can we can take from the Reagan era, “Just say no”.

[Ymir's blood]

Originally Posted by lisarea

my plumber doesn't have any reason to see pictures of my dog.

That way the first time he sees it, it will be the last thing he ever sees!