idproxy.net
January 31st, 2007 - Fred StutzmanA few days ago, Simon Willison introduced idproxy.net, a service that allows you to use you Yahoo! credentials to log in to any OpenID website. Idproxy serves as a proxy between Yahoo’s browser-based authentication and OpenID, essentially allowing you to use your Yahoo credentials as an OpenID. Kudos to Simon for creating such an innovative tool, and we love the fact ClaimID’s logo is on the front page :).
January 31st, 2007 at 4:13 am
That is wild– Yahoo released their authentication API a few weeks (or was it just days?) ago and I thought great! They get it. I also wondered if it would become popular and push out openID/distributed efforts.
But then I looked at the terms of use, and you have to register your product with them.
But now idproxy.net has registered with them but is offering arbitrary authentication to any _other_ service. I wonder if Yahoo will catch onto this and deem it in violation of the terms of use.
January 31st, 2007 at 7:24 am
If I’m not mistaken, Willison actually works for Yahoo, so this presents an interesting situation
My gut is Yahoo gets it, and they will find some way to let Idproxy continue.
January 31st, 2007 at 3:37 pm
I have tried to register for ClaimID so many times with my gmail account (vikram.aditya.madan@gmail.com) but I dont get a confirmation email, and i cannot log into to claimID. What could be going wrong?
January 31st, 2007 at 5:45 pm
I’m pretty sure Simon is ex-Yahoo now.
And yes, I’d be surprised if Yahoo! doesn’t ‘get it’.
update: ex-yahoo, confirmed
January 31st, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Vikram,
There’s no record of an account getting created (and a confirmation email being sent). Please confirm that you’re making it past the registration screen successfully.
If you cannot, please let us know with an email what account name you’d like and we’ll get things sorted out.
Terrell
February 1st, 2007 at 10:46 am
I am indeed an ex-Yahoo!, but response from within the company seems pretty positive (it got a write-up on the official Yahoo! Developer Network blog) so I’m not worried about being ToS’d out of existence. It’s a perfectly legitimate usage of their authentication API, which is designed to support SSO.
February 1st, 2007 at 1:23 pm
ah, well there you have it. Hi Simon.
February 1st, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Simon, congrats on this! You’ve been doing great work for OpenID.