osgeo.codepad.org

Online compilers are another generation of collaborative debugging tools delivered to Open Source communities. The overall idea is great. Actually, I can not imagine online discussions on IRC channel without being able to paste code snippets or compilation logs.

The codepad.org provides feature called private and project pastes. Some time ago I proposed private general purpose paste service dedicated to OSGeo communities. it is hosted at osgeo.pastebin.com and people has found it useful, as I can see. Today, I registered osgeo.codepad.org – a programmers-oriented paste service. Perhaps, people will find it useful too..

Users of the World’s second best programming editor, Vim (first place taken by Emacs), can install codepad.vim plug-in and send Vim buffers as pastes directly to the codepad.org service. Kudos to Nicolas Weber for the plug-in!

I’ve taken the liberty and modified the plug-in to use the private service at osgeo.codepad.org – here is custom codepad.vim plug-in.

Learning the OpenID problems

OpenID logoContinuing 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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