Windows Live to act as OpenID providerIn July of last year, Microsoft threw its weight behind supporting the OpenID protocol. In February of this year, Microsoft joined the OpenID foundation's board. Now, Microsoft has committed to OpenID further by announcing that Windows Live will become a OpenID provider and that you will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID enabled website.OpenID is a distributed authentication method for allowing users to securely use a single digital ID to sign into multiple websites on the Internet. AOL and Yahoo already allow users to authenticate against their AOL or Yahoo credentials on sites using OpenID. Google so far has not adopted OpenID through any supported means. Currently Microsoft's OpenID implementation is on their Windows Live ID Integration environment, intended for sites and software providers who provide OpenID authentication to test against the service. Your normal Windows Live ID cannot currently be used for OpenID. Microsoft does not seem to have any plans to allow the use of your OpenID to login to sites that require a Windows Live ID. Meaning you'll still need to maintain accounts at Yahoo, AOL and Windows Live to login to services on their individual sites. However, in becoming a provider, Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction towards opening up their services.Microsoft has given no specifics on when they plan to make OpenID authentication available on their public servers. View: Sign-Up for Testing Read full story...
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