I'd disagree. My personal opinion is, BrowserID/Persona was a bad thing for the web and it's a good thing it haven't hit any big. Sure, it was better than most popular protocols out there, but it was still wrong.
My opinion is that BrowserID had a very flawed core concept. I firmly believe that my identity is something that I [can] naturally define and possess. But everyone since OpenID had stolen this from the end-user and identities became something that you're provided with - and I find the very term "identity provider" unnerving.
With identity providers you're not you anymore, but merely your Facebook account or your email address or your domain name - a things you only temporarily lease from a third-party like an email provider or a domain registry. Sure, there's some common sense, legal protections and stuff, but I'm don't like merely relying on those. I think, in a sane world, at least personal (i.e. non-group) identities must be merely asserted, not provided - and they must originate from a person themself.
On the contrary, this login-with-ssh thingy and few other schemes (gpgAuth and WebID) are much closer to what the things should be like. While they don't yet completely resolve the distinction between an identity and a credential (it's really hard), they root your identity in something that you can actually define for yourself and handle without depending on anyone else - a key pair.
My opinion is that BrowserID had a very flawed core concept. I firmly believe that my identity is something that I [can] naturally define and possess. But everyone since OpenID had stolen this from the end-user and identities became something that you're provided with - and I find the very term "identity provider" unnerving.
With identity providers you're not you anymore, but merely your Facebook account or your email address or your domain name - a things you only temporarily lease from a third-party like an email provider or a domain registry. Sure, there's some common sense, legal protections and stuff, but I'm don't like merely relying on those. I think, in a sane world, at least personal (i.e. non-group) identities must be merely asserted, not provided - and they must originate from a person themself.
On the contrary, this login-with-ssh thingy and few other schemes (gpgAuth and WebID) are much closer to what the things should be like. While they don't yet completely resolve the distinction between an identity and a credential (it's really hard), they root your identity in something that you can actually define for yourself and handle without depending on anyone else - a key pair.