Yeraze's Domain 3.0

I’m really liking how Disqus handles comments, and they just added support for "Facebook Connect" registration.  This means that in addition to posting anonymousy or with your Disqus account, you can post with your Facebook account.  To most people this will seem pointless, but it’s another handy option.

[tag:facebook][tag:disqus][tag:website]

Yesterday I was contacted via Twitter to join a new website (well, new to me anyway) called WishPot. It’s a wishlist management website similar to the wishlist at Amazon and other online retailers. The main difference is that it is separate from the retailers and combines the wishlist features with attractive shopping features like reviews, price comparisons at competing retailers, and alerts on sales and

discounts.

I created an account (My Account) and it automatically imported my old Amazon wishlist (Amazon’s imported list). They offer a great bookmarklet to let you add items to a wishlist from anywhere on the web. Since I was asked to be a "Gadget Expert", I used the bookmarklet to add some of my favorite gadgets to my Recommendation list with surprising success. Some of my recommendation are rather obscure but it did a very good job with them.

So far I’m impressed. I’m going to start hosting my wishlist there. It’s a bit late to start creating wishlists for Christmas, but it should work well for birthdays and such. Maybe I can convince some relatives to start using it and make all our lives alot easier.  They also offer an intriguing mobile service where you can send them a picture or ISBN/UPC number of an item, and they’ll send you back prices & reviews.  I’ll probably try that a bit and see how well it works, look for a future post here about the details. [tag:web2.0][tag:wishpot][tag:wishlist]

I’m surprised I had never heard of this before, but I today heard about a tiny little gadget named the "YubiKey".  It’s a small USB Dongle from a company called Yubico that emulates a USB Keyboard.  It’s primary function is to function as a hardware authentication token, similar to an RSA key or SecureID card.  However, since it emulates a keyboard, it’s compatible with a wide variety of tools.  For example:

• Turn off the randomization and input a static password, and then you can use it with any Username/Password application.   The IS Department of Boca Raton uses this with TrueCrypt to securely encrypt data. ( US E-government uses YubiKey for secure file storage )
• Use their supplied OpenID server to make the YubiKey your authentication means for any OpenID enabled website
• They offer a good API to allow developers to integrate it.  The latest beta of PasswordSafe supports it ( Latest PasswordSafe Betas )

It seems pretty neat, especially if it gets wider support.  The YubiKey is only about $15 a pop (cheaper in bulk), and can be corporately branded to let them be used by companies (Imagine VPN authentication tokens). 

Unfortunately, I see a few problems with it:

1. It’s a USB device, which means how do you authenticate with an OpenID service from a mobile device? (Like my iPhone)
2. How do you use it in restricted environments?  (If I plug an unknown USB device into my computer at work, I’m gonna wind up in a heap of trouble).
3. To use the OpenID support, you have to use their OpenID service.  That’s not a huge deal since my OpenID logins are connected to here (www.yeraze.com) and I could simply change my supplier (YAY OpenID!), but I’ld kinda prefer to keep it with MyOpenID if possible.

All that said, it still shows alot of promise.  Small enough to go on a keychain, cheap enough to be mass-market, and powerful enough to be used in a wide variety of situations.  It’s something I definatley plan to dig into deeper. [tag:hardware][tag:security][tag:yubikey]