[Social] Current Happenings: Webfinger auth scheme

[Sean Corbett]

Hi GNU Social!

A group of developers of GNU Social met with Craig Andrews (StatusNet 
and a new Socialite) and Blaine Cook last week to discuss what needed to 
be done to the StatusNet codebase in order to provide a more 
full-featured social networking experience. One of the biggest issues 
facing us at the moment is how to authenticate users between GNU Social 
instances, so as to provide access/privacy controls on content posted to 
the network. Blaine has been working on a scheme for authentication 
based on Webfinger ( http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/ ) and OAuth. 
While he anticipates publishing a specification shortly, he explained 
his idea well enough for Ian Denhardt and I to make a toy implementation 
of it, as specified on the TODO list (see the wiki: 
http://gitorious.org/social/pages/Home ). The code will be posted within 
the next day or so, and there are plans to have some of the original 
StatusNet developers incorporate this functionality into the StatusNet 
core proper. In the meantime, you can read a (relatively vague) 
description of the protocol at my blog: http://scorebett.doesntexist.com .

--scorbett