Security quotes of the week

Advocates for data retention typically focus narrowly on the benefits afforded to law enforcement without accounting for the massive costs and extreme security risks that come with storing significant quantities of data about every Internet user — databanks that will prove to be irresistible not only to government investigators but also civil litigants (read: ex-spouses, insurance companies, disgruntled neighbors) and malicious hackers of every stripe. A legal obligation to log users' Internet use, paired with weak federal privacy laws that allow the government to easily obtain those records, would dangerously expand the government's ability to surveil its citizens, damage privacy, and chill freedom of expression.

We first jumped on the OpenID bandwagon back in 2007 when it was seen as a promising way to make logging into websites simpler. What we've learned over the past three years is that it didn't actually make anything any simpler for the vast majority of our customers. Instead it just made things harder. Especially when people were having problems with the often flaky OpenID providers and couldn't log into their account. OpenID has been a burden on support since the day it was launched.