On 06/06/07 01:30 Peter da Silva wrote: > Myself, I think the idea that one should have to have an "account" on > most websites is itself hateful.
I wouldn't say "most" websites. (I'm often surprised at how many websites will still let me submit anonymous comments.) If you want to have a website with some kind of discussion board, you need some kind of authentication. You can farm that out to a central system (such as Microsoft Passport) or you can let everybody manage their own. The former has a lot of hateful aspects: cost of entry is one, doing it in a secure manner is another. You can let your web browser remember passwords for you, but remembering values for forms has a lot of other hate: the last time I checked, Firefox did a crap job of encrypting master passwords; and remembering form values over https also allows it to remember credit card numbers.
