Re: Openbadges and Mozilla Persona

On 31 December 2015 at 23:29, Fabio Barone <holon.earth@gmail.com> wrote:

> I apologize especially for the Web-Payments group for this post, as it is
> not strictly related to web payments, but mentions a technology which has
> been discussed in the group.
>
> I would like to write a project proposal for a city municipality which
> would promote self-directed learning and citizen science.
>
> It is quite ambitious and may never take off.
>
> The idea would be heavily based on Openbadges [1].
>
> According to the site, Openbadges uses Mozilla Persona.
> I think to remember that Mozilla Persona has been heavily discussed in
> this group, and I also think to remember that there were some rumors
> circulating of a possible demise.
>

FYI: Mozilla just announced that Persona is shutting down:

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/persona-notices/2016/000005.html

I think it may have been designed better.  Namely, using URIs as
identifiers would have allowed it to scale better, imho.

Three specific restrictions that I'd would have liked to see slightly
loosened:

- not being tied solely to email addresses
- not using mozilla as a trusted third party
- not having to remember a new (second) password for your email address

Hopefully some good lessons learnt from Persona, Mozllla/firefox are still
well placed to create a first class user centric identity solution, and
hopefully the next offering may be more scalable and more secure.


>
> I searched the web and found contradictory information.
> What do people here think about using Mozilla Persona for identification
> today?
>
> Ideally I would like to propose an identification system run by the city
> itself, and not by Mozilla (there may be privacy and legal issues). This
> would probably mean having to run Mozilla Persona through the city's IT
> infrastructure, which seems to be possible.
>
> Nevertheless based on the rumors I would like to know if it's wise to
> build on that. I could very well think of some custom identification system
> which could be linked to Openbadges.
>
> [1] http://openbadges.org
>
>
>