Mateusz Loskot

Continuing my recent discussion about OpenID and considering OpenID usage for authenticating to OSGeo services, I wanted to make a short review of its disadvantages. The OpenID advantages are well-known and can be described with a short statement:

open, decentralized, free framework, which allows Internet users to control their digital life with single identity

Stefan Brand collected number of opinions about OpenID and compiled a very interesting post on his blog about problem(s) with OpenID. Stefan’s blog entry is pretty long, so to understand his findings easier, I decided to abstract key thoughts on that matter.

Stefan summarized main problems and sources of OpenID criticism as follows:

OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing to become an OpenID consumer.

Next, complaints about the OpenID framework are presented in a few categories, which I’m going to summarize below.

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A few weeks ago, CASCADOSS project leaders requested for patronage from the OSGeo Foundation for two upcoming events: International Symposium and International Information Workshop. The request was approved and final decision was made during the 36th OSGeo Board Meeting.

Yesterday, Frank Warmerdam officially announced this fact in the OSGeo News: OSGeo Supports CASCADOSS

Detailed document describing the Support for CASCADOSS is available on the OSGeo Wiki, together with body of letter of support. Printed copy of the letter was sent to the CASCADOSS project leaders.

On May 8th, Ross Turk posted on the SourceForge.net community blog: Hey! So I’ll just blurt it out: we’ve joined the OpenID Foundation!. As Ross confirms, OpenID use is becoming very popular, means users like the idea of decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide.

In the initial announcement about the OpenID idea, SF.net stuff revealed they use OpenID implementation from Zend Framework - Open Source Software (oh yeah!) available under BSD License.

Recently, I’ve noticed that Chris brought the idea of OpenID to OSGeo year ago and setup necessary infrastructure, so OSGeo userid can be used as an openid.

I tried today to use OpenID capabilities of OSGeo User ID, but without any luck. It seems like the service has been disabled or moved without update in docs. Anyway, I hope we are going to keep it running. Hmm, it’s unclear to me if the OSGeo User ID is supposed to work as an OpenID and allow OSGeo users to authenticate to external non-OSGeo services with it, like to SourceForge.net. Is it?.

I’m wondering if it would be reasonable and beneficial the OSGeo Foundation participates in activities lead by the OpenID Foundation. What about joining the OpenID Foundation as a non-profit organization?

During last weeks, a lot of fresh bits have been contributed to the PostGIS provider for FDO Open Source. The great part of this work was committed by Bruno Scott and his colleagues. Bruno has recently joined the FDO development team. I’d like to express my deep gratitude to Bruno for his fantastic help in improving the PostGIS provider. The provider has got better shape and stability.

Recently, I’ve failed my duties in the provider development, so motivated by the load of Bruno’s work I found some gaps in time to submit a few fixes too :-)

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This is a short post spreading the announcement about upcoming RMA 2008 conference. The RMA 2008 is the 2008 World Conference on Natural Resource Modeling. It will be held at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW), Warsaw, Poland, June 15-18, 2008.

The conference will provide a forum for the presentation of recent progress in the use of modeling techniques to help in the understanding and managing of complex natural resource systems

The call for papers has been opened very recently and not yet widely announced. As I’ve been told by organizers, it’s possible to present applications and software packages related to the conference matter. I’ve been wondering if there would be anyone from the OSGeo Community interested to present FOSS solutions for environmental related problems.

By the way, RMA 2008 is planned on the same week as Cascadoss symposium and workshop. So, there is some chance to visit both events.

The March 20th, 2008 brought us new patch release of GDAL library. It doesn’t include any new features but a very tidy set of 65 bug fixes. Great Job GDAL Team!

The source code packages with GDAL/OGR 1.5.1 are available from the OSGeo download server.

Today is a wonderful day! The Canadian minister of immigration and citizenship Diane Finley announced that citizens of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Lithuania can travel to Canada and remain there for 3 months without a visa.

I’m a Polish, so hurray! One of my dream has become truth.

Visiting the Vancouver Island in September 2007 with my fiancee Aneta stroke our fancies and we are going to come to back there, probably after the journey to Cape Town for the FOSS4G 2008.

It is not a secret that our long term plan is to stay and work in Canada for a couple of years or longer.