The many strengths of idproxy.net

Phishers hate this.

By now you’ve heard of Simon Willison’s idproxy: a proxy between OpenID and Yahoo! authentication.

It works as advertised, letting you use Yahoo user ids proxied via OpenID.

What’s really great about it, apart from the obvious proxying is:

• Simple and immediately intuitive UI.

• You can have multiple OpenID identities linked to a single Yahoo! identity. This means you can control your privacy to some degree.

• idproxy.net stores pending authentication requests, so you can stack them and execute in batch.

• Good anti-phishing tactics: Monster avatars are cool and the system will never let you log in a side-effect of the authentication flow (and therefore thwarting the most obvious phishing attempts). See picture above.

Great work, Simon!