Wish you didn't have so many web usernames and passwords?

I'll be away for two weeks so I may not be able to update the blog, although so far I think I'm the only one here (that means if you leave a comment you will probably be the first! Go ahead!).

Have you heard of The Long Bet? Setup to encourage long-term thinking, it challenges people to make predictions about major trends in the future, like the one that says that by 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing Test. Anyone else can then challenge that prediction and then a bet can be formulated. The Turing Test bet is $20,000 between Ray Kurzweil, inventor of optical character recognition and voice sysnthesis technologies and Mitchell Kapor he developed Lotus 123. The Turing Test was proposed by Alan Turing as a way to find whether a computer could think. The tester would interview two subjects, one of which would be a computer. If the tester could not tell which was the computer, the computer would pass the test.

I thought of a long bet - by the end of this decade more than 70% of secure websites will accept 3rd party authentication, so that the user will not have to sign up to many different secure sites, all with different usernames and passwords. But this bet is not much of a risk, especially after what I read this morning about BBAuth, a new web service from Yahoo.

Yahoo have come up with a method of allowing web applications to pass authentication to Yahoo's site. The apps don't see the username or password but they get a hashed username back that identifies the user. This means if a web app implements BBAuth, you will be able to sign up to the app using your Yahoo id, but the app doesn't see your username and password. You can already do this with Flickr but we may see lots of other implementations coming soon. Google released something similar called Authsub a while ago, but it didn't get the same buzz.