OpenID, XRI, and Rails
August 17th, 2008
I spent this morning adding i-name support to the open_id_authentication plugin. Until it gets merged with the master repository, you’re welcome to take a look and tinker with my branch on Github: http://github.com/peat/open_id_authentication
What is an i-name? It’s an alternative way to identify yourself through OpenID. Instead of using my DNS based OpenID (peat.myopenid.com), I can use my i-name (=peat) … it’s a lot shorter, and it’s not explicitly tied to a specific company or location.
Interested? Read more about i-names over here.
By Steve Beattie
How is this shorter? An i-name needs to be attached to an i-broker somehow, in order to distinguish your =peat from my phony =peat, no? Presumably we’re all not going to agree on a single broker, so that we don’t have yet another landrush to grab our distinctive monikers. But perhaps there’s something obvious I’m missing, but a cursory examination of the wikipedia pages didn’t show it.
By Peat
It behaves a lot like DNS — xri.net is sort of the “root server” for i-names. If you’re authenticating an i-name, you query xri.net to see who the broker is for that record. For example, you can hit http://xri.net/=peat and get forwarded on to 1id.com where I purchased and manage my i-name.
So, yeah. If it catches on, there’s definitely going to be another land rush.