I personally believe that I agree with you both. Actually, one may adopt a technique which I sort of regularly use when I have very long comments in answer to some blog posts: mimicking a behaviour that's automatic in some platforms (Wordpress, I believe) I insert only a brief excerpt of my comment there, complete of link(s) to the full one, posted in my own blog. Without going this exact route, and following the very recommendations of Stack Overflow, one may write: "I suggest you the same technique I adopted in ***" where *** is a link to a PerlMonks node where additional details that would be irrelevant there are included.
Now... to the OpenID's vexata quaestio: following Aristotle's recommendation, I would like to answer some question at SO. Thus, I need an OpenID: a friend of mine told me I already have, due to having e.g. a Technorati or a Flickr account - indeed that's what the SO's login form itself says. But then, I'm maybe just too dense: can I use e.g. "my flickr url" out of the box? It says I must "enable OpenID support with my preferred provider" and I think I can manage to do so... but is there any particular advantage choosing one provider over another?
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but is there any particular advantage choosing one provider over another?
Most importantly you should trust your OpenID provider. He can track your logins to SO, and if he decides to go evil he can log with your ID (without you ever noticing), and if he stops to provide his services, you're locked out.
So if you equally trust both OpenID providers, I don't see why you should chose one over the other - just go with the one you like better.
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I personally believe that I must be very dumb then! I think I've understood what OpenID is about and I've read extensively those other blog entries linked to here which explain its inherent risks. However, I decided to trust it: to be sure, I chose flickr as my provider, and I duly enabled OpenID support. Now I go to http://stackoverflow.com/users/authenticate and I select flickr as a provider, adding my ID there, which is -unsurprisingly- blazar. Then I click on the login button, and I'm brought to Yahoo!'s login page, where I do login. (Alternatively, I may have already been logged in, in which case this step would have been skipped: I tried many times already, logging in, logging out...) Now it tells me (in Italian, so maybe the words won't be just the same as those you'd see...) that "I'm entering stackoverflow.com" and to press "let me in" to do so. But when I do so, I'm brought back to SO, where they tell me that they couldn't authenticate me. And I've tried several times, on several PC's deleting cookies, and making all sort of attempts! So what's up with it?
Update: what that's described above is the situation as it has been all of yesterday up to another attempt tried this morning. [Murphy's law?] I tried one more time after posting this, and... it works now! I presume it takes "some time" for this OpenID thingy to really "activate," doesn't it?
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