Any thoughts on the new LID distributed authentication?

Light-Weight Identity is a new proposal for de-centralized distributed authentication which seems to have solved many of the issues of accountability in online identity management without handing the keys for the entire system to some nebulous external authority.

We follow a tradition of "simple" or "light-weight" protocols, such as LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), SNMP (the Simple Network Management Protocol) and others. Those protocols are simplifications of more complex protocols; but instead of being less capable due to fewer features, those simple and light-weight protocols have had runaway success that their more complex predecessors lacked.

This was because their simplification reduced the required complexity to the point where many people could easily support them, and that was one of the goals for us when we came up with LID. So many existing identity schemes are just far too complicated to be adoptable broadly.

In a nutshell, the LID server is a webservice that anyone can install on any website where they have permission to do so -- so there's a long-range application here for Drupal to act as a LID server for all locally registered members (or some subset of members); there'd be some development involved to implement all the services, a hefty bit of work to make it happen, but if LID does take off, finding a LID server will become a real problem for most people (ISP-hosted web accounts wouldn't allow the CGI, and most users wouldn't have the expertise to manage it all, fill out all the XML or hand-edit the perl)

Short term, however, this could really help Drupal in the Comment Authentication area; we may not want to make a full jump to LID for logins (or maybe we do?) but allowing comment-authentication via LID would be pretty easy to retrofit on the current comment code, and LID might be very useful for the immediate problem of identifying trustable comment submissions.

Comments?