[no subject]

["Scott Henson" <shenson2@wvu.edu>]

I was recently reading an article on the Liberty Alliance, Sun's new
initiative to combat M$ Passport. As I looked through it I had a thought.
What if *nix's existing authentication system was used to build net
authentication system. First of all logging in to your *nix account could
have all your user names and passwords stored in an encrypted file in your
home directory, and then *nix could log in to any sites that you needed to.
The authentication daemon could know which user name and password
combination goes to each web site and you would never have to login ever
again. Also the same daemon could handle your personal information as well.
When ever a web site requested information the daemon would ask you if you
wanted to give them such information. I'm not entirely sure on how such a
system could be implemented, but cgi and standard field names could make it
work. I dont know how feisable this is, or if this even intrests anyone, but
*nix could be the first OS out there with web authentication and it could
help set a standard for such a system. This could go a long way to bringing
linux into home use. Just a thought.