Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

Automated email-based password reestablishment (EBPR) is an efficient, cost-effective means to deal with forgotten passwords. Simple Authentication for the Web (SAW) [pdf] improves upon this basic approach to user authentication to create an alternative to password-based logins.

Who doesn’t get annoyed with those unsolicited messages on mortgage, viagra and other strange medicines in their mailbox? And while, nearly two thirds of all email is spam, and while, between 2005 and 2006, the number of unsolicited e-mails increased 147 percent. And yet, while, US and Taiwan lead the spamming spree, there’s still some good news. It’s satisfying to read this on my WP dashboard …

Akismet has caught 10,133 spam for you since you first installed it.

And that’s just my blog, in a short span of 3-4 months. Even more satisfying to notice this on my hosting panel …

SpamAssassin has caught 12,590 spam in the past 60 days.

And finally, from my own research Gmail detects nearly 90% of all spam coming to my Gmail mailbox (although it still shows some false identifications). Hmm, getting there, slowly but surely.

Just a quick roundup of OpenID, which I’m sure will have wide-spread acceptance and usage in the user management space for both web-based as well as software applications.

OpenID is a decentralized system to verify one’s online identity. On OpenID-enabled sites, Internet users do not need to register and manage a new account before being granted access. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID “identity provider”, sometimes called an i-broker (like MyOpenID and many more). They can also link to this identity provider from another website they own and log in using that website’s URI instead, allowing them to connect their identity to their website. A website which accepts sign-ins from OpenID is called a “relying party.”

OpenID is increasingly gaining adoption amongst large sites, with organizations like AOL both acting as a provider as well as Wikipedia announcing that they will support OpenID. In addition, integrated OpenID support has been made a mandatory priority in Firefox 3 and Microsoft is working on implementing OpenID 2.0 in Windows Vista.

More about OpenID at Wikipedia.

Here’s a clever service I stumbled upon during my morning browse. Gadget Theft have setup an online service where you simply register your device (iPods, USB Flash Drives, Digital Cameras and others), and install their agent files in the root of your device. If your device is stolen you simply log into their system and flag it as lost or stolen. The next time the lost device is plugged into a computer it will attempt to “ping” back to Gadget Theft and provide critical forensic data regarding the system it is plugged into. Nice!

FireFox 1.5 is out! Can’t trust IE (yet) for online banking and stuff that requires digital security.