I just saw this article about something called OpenID which is meant to replace passwords using some encryption technology that users dont actually see. Im sure most of you know about it but its news to me. What are your thoughts on this? Do you think this is the way of the future?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/te...o_interstitial

Until they do something stupid, yes, it's the way to go. The whole idea is to have 1 password for everything, but only managed by 1 site. Then, you share the info you want without ever having your password on a variety of systems in totally insecure fashions.

Something I will be integrating into my code in the next couple of months and I already see on a number of very high traffic sites.

In the article they said that Google / MS/ Yahoo wont integrate with eachother yet. That they dont feel comftorable giving up that much control yet.

I guess I will have to read up on this though.

That's just b/c of their egos and highly-customized code. OpenID isn't the easiest thing in the universe to integrate into code and I'd bet that it'll be a pain for those bigger companies (though, one would think that with their staff it would be substantially faster than me doing it on my own )