Archive for the ‘Identity’ Category

File Under: Browsers, Identity, Social
Feb
23
2012

Mozilla’s ‘Persona’ Project Wants to Help Manage Your Online Identity

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Mozilla has unveiled a new distributed online identity system dubbed Mozilla Persona. The new Persona project is Mozilla’s latest effort to tackle online identity management by shifting the focus from individual websites to the web browser.

Mozilla has been playing with the idea of a browser-based identity manager for quite some time. In 2010 the company launched its Account Manager project, though it failed to gain much traction and was later scrapped.

More recently Mozilla has been working on Browser ID, a similar effort to move the process of managing passwords and online identities to the browser, rather than relying on any particular website’s login process. The Browser ID project offers developers a means of creating a browser-based login system for their sites. The code is available through GitHub and while using it is considerably simpler than similar efforts like OAuth, Browser ID has yet to catch on with many sites.

Mozilla Persona will build on Browser ID’s foundation (Browser ID will continue to be the name of the developer-facing aspect of the protocol), but add in more end user features like “an identity dashboard.” As with Browser ID, Persona will face a chicken and egg problem — why bother supporting Persona when few people are using it, and why bother using it when so few sites support it?

Thus far, aside from the proposed dashboard, Mozilla’s goals for Persona are only vaguely outlined. The closest Mozilla comes to giving it a concrete definition is to say that Persona will consist of “a collection of components and experiences we’re designing to manage the whole of a user’s online identity.”

If you’ve got ideas or opinions about what Persona ought to offer, you can let Mozilla know your thoughts via the mailing list or through Twitter using the #browserid or #mozpersona hash-tags.

For those wondering about the old Personas, the toolbar background images that can be applied to Firefox, fear not, they remain available and Mozilla is already on the hunt for a more fitting name.

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File Under: Identity, privacy, Social
Sep
23
2011

Facebook Wants Your Past, Present, and Future On Open Graphs and Timelines

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Facebook will soon allow its users to integrate all of their music, media, and lifestyle actions and interactions with their profiles, Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s f8 conference yesterday. Connecting profiles to services like Spotify will allow users to fill out their own curated “Timeline,” so friends can see each others’ media activities both as individuals and aggregated over their entire network, a move that will explode the amount of content on the site.

The new arrangement is part of two new Facebook initiatives, one of which is the Timeline. Users can fill in their Timelines with both content pulled in from other services — say, an article “liked” on Ars Technica or a game played — as well as “real world” activities like photos or status updates. The real world content can be filtered by date into the timeline, so users can fill in their backstory on the site with everything that happened before Facebook existed: moves to a new city, first words as a baby, or every single relationship breakup pre-2004.

Once in place, the timeline will be the new News Feed, with friends’ updates streaming past. But not everything will make it into the Timeline: small updates, like what music friends are listening to, may be relegated to the Ticker, the integrated online friends/status update bar rolled out Wednesday. Users will be able to choose which activities are significant enough to appear in their timelines.

Zuckerberg also placed emphasis on the new use of verbs in timelines, which will allow people to sort their friends activities in different ways. For instance, with a status update reading “Casey Johnston is watching Veronica Mars for the millionth time,” users will be able to click both “watching” to see what else friends are viewing at the moment, or “Veronica Mars” to see a list of other friends who like Veronica Mars.

These updates will feed into the second new feature, Facebook Open Graph, which collects and ranks the the activities or items that friends are interacting with. Apps that integrate with Facebook will be sorted in Open Graph based on popularity with a user and his or her friends, including Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, Foodspotting, Vevo, and Nike+, among many others. Open Graph is intended to help with app discoverability, showing users what their friends are doing without flooding their feeds every time a friend kills a mobster or plants a new crop of corn.

When Timeline was introduced, Chris Cox, director of product at Facebook, noted that “there is nothing we love to summarize more than time itself,” stating that with the new features it would be possible for users to create months or years in review.

Of course, Facebook’s entire motivation isn’t just for friends to become more intimate with each others’ past and present. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke briefly at the conference, and noted that “because our [Spotify's] playlists are social, they [users] are more engaged. And because they are engaged, they are more than twice as likely to pay for music.” For Spotify, which boasted 2 million paying members worldwide as of Wednesday, the exposure to the better part of a billion Facebook members could mean big bucks.

The new completionist Facebook is a significant departure from what Facebook’s most avid competitors, Google+ and Twitter, currently offer on their sites. If Facebook can get users to buy into putting their whole life histories on the site, the amount of content there will explode, and create an investment and representation of self users won’t be likely to abandon. And with more content comes more opportunities to target ads.

The beta for Facebook’s timelines begins today, with availability being rolled out gradually. Neither Zuckerberg nor any of the speakers mentioned a timeline for the new version, but we expect it will be sooner rather than later.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

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File Under: Identity, Security, Web Basics
Apr
22
2011

EFF Wants to Secure the Web With “HTTPS Now” Campaign

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has kicked off a new “HTTPS Now” campaign to educate consumers and help “make web surfing safer.”

The new campaign is a two part effort. First the EFF would like to encourage users to install the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on, which will automatically redirect you to https connections. HTTPS Everywhere makes sure you’re always using a secure connection when you visit Gmail, Twitter and several dozen other sites; you don’t need to worry about checking the URL everytime you login.

While HTTPS Everywhere is a good suggestion for users, the primary thrust of the HTTPS Now campaign is aimed at popular websites. After all, HTTPS Everywhere only works if your favorite sites offer secure connections, and an alarming number of sites do not.

The EFF has partnered with Access, a digital freedom activist group, to create the new HTTPS Now website. The new site will keep track of which sites offer HTTPS connections, how much of the site is secure and whether or not the site mixes secure and insecure content.

Why all the fuss about HTTPS? Well, every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection, you expose your data to the world. It’s a bit like writing your username and password on a postcard and dropping it in the mailbox.

There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP — HTTPS. That extra “S” in the URL means your connection is secure, and it’s much harder for anyone else to see what you’re doing. Think of the extra “S” as the envelop that keeps prying eyes from looking at your postcards.

The problem gets a bit more complicated than just HTTPS though. Most sites already use HTTPS to handle your login info — that’s a good first step — but once you’re logged in the sites often revert back to using an insecure HTTP connection. That means you’re vulnerable to simple attacks like those made possible by the Firesheep Firefox plugin. Firesheep sniffs network traffic and looks for insecure cookies which it then uses to spoof your login credentials to the site. Firesheep allows other people to quickly and easily become you on the web.

So why doesn’t the entire web use HTTPS all the time? The answer is slightly complicated, but the primary reason is speed. HTTPS can’t be cached on CDN networks and there are also some (minor) costs involved with HTTPS certificates.

But obviously neither cost nor minor speed hits have stopped big sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Flickr from implementing HTTPS. The EFF would like to encourage other sites to follow suit.

If you’d like to see how your favorite sites fair when it comes to protecting your data from traffic snoops, head on over to the HTTPS Now website.

Photo: Joffley/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Identity, privacy
Mar
31
2011

Mozilla’s ‘Do Not Track’ Header Is Starting to Catch on With Advertisers

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Among the many new features in Firefox 4 is support for the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header. If you turn on the DNT header in Firefox 4′s preferences pane, the browser will broadcast a custom header in HTTP requests which tells servers you want to opt out of any tracking cookies.

Mozilla developed the DNT header to give users an easier way to opt out of increasingly intrusive online tracking by websites and advertisers. The header is, in the long run, a far better solution than constantly updating cookie-based block lists, which is currently the main solution for most users.

The problem with the DNT header is that, until now, no websites actually looked for it.

That, however, is changing. Mozilla announced today that the AP News Registry has implemented support for the DNT header across 800 news sites, which see more than 175 million unique visitors every month. That’s a huge shot in the arm for Do Not Track, which was previously a great idea, but one with little real world application.

Starting today, provided you turn on the DNT preference in Firefox 4, the AP News Registry will no longer set any cookies.

Mozilla also reports that it is in talks with the Digital Advertising Alliance to get the self-regulating group to support the DNT header as well. Strange though it may sound, the online ad industry actually has a decent track record of working with privacy advocates and even offers its own cookie-based opt out list. In other words, there is a good chance that DNT will be broadly adopted within the online ad industry.

While the DNT header seems well on its way to becoming a de facto standard (and a real standard, provided the W3C accepts it), it’s important to bear in mind that it will never stop rogue advertisers who choose to ignore your DNT settings. For the bad apples in the bunch, cookie-based blocking will remain the only viable option.

Footprints photo by Vinoth Chandar/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Browsers, Identity
Feb
9
2011

Firefox 4 Beta 11 Offers ‘Do Not Track’ Privacy Setting

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Firefox 4 goes to eleven. Mozilla has released an eleventh beta of Firefox 4, the next major version of the browser. Beta 11 includes the usual bug fixes and speed improvements, but it also has a new feature — the “Do Not Track” setting Mozilla is hoping will become a standard.

If you’re already using Firefox 4 you should be automatically updated. If you’d like to help Mozilla test Firefox 4, head over to the beta downloads page and grab a copy of beta 11.

The Do Not Track feature is a new HTTP header that will stop behavioral advertising tools from tracking where you go on the web. To turn on the new feature just check the box under the Advanced tab in Firefox 4′s preferences.

For now all you’ll be doing is broadcasting the new header information; it won’t actually have any effect. Because no online advertisers yet support the header, the new feature won’t protect your privacy. However, some of the biggest names on internet advertising already voluntarily offer a cookie-based opt-out system and it seems likely that, with Mozilla behind the new header, the same companies will support the new option eventually.

Mozilla is planning to release at least one more beta and then a round of release candidates before Firefox 4 is finalized later this year.

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