asciinema switching to Mozilla Persona for login Published on 24 Oct 2013 by Marcin Kulik
So far you could log in to asciinema using your Github or Twitter account via OAuth. The idea behind this was twofold:
- avoid passwords,
- make it as simple as possible.
Passwords are insecure, inconvenient and annoying. Inconvenience of passwords was nicely summed up by Xavier in his tweet saying “password reset is the new login”. So the OAuth flow, being very simple for the user (given he/she is already logged in at the provider), helped achieving the initial goals.
And while OAuth based login worked totally fine it made asciinema dependent on commercial vendors for no good reason. OAuth was designed for API authorization between applications, not for user authentication. asciinema doesn’t need access to user’s Github repositories nor user’s tweets. It just needs the ability to authenticate a user. Also, the assumption that everyone has either Github or Twitter account is simply wrong.
The assumption that everyone has an email address is a correct one though. E-mail is ubiquitous and everyone remembers his/her own address. Can’t we just use it as an ID on the web? Mozilla believes we can and we should. Mozilla Persona, a reference implementation of BrowserID protocol, puts the email address at the center of authentication and gives us simple, privacy-sensitive single sign-in solution.
asciinema team believes in Mozilla’s mission for promoting openness and innovation on the web, and thus we switch to Persona based authentication, replacing the existing OAuth based flow. If you have an existing asciinema account then fear not, you won’t lose access to it. When signing in just use the same email address that you assigned to your account. If you don’t remember which one you have used (or you haven’t set the email address at all) then sign in (with your preferred email address) and you’ll be given an option to locate your existing account by doing the OAuth dance for one last time.
Let us know what you think about this change. Enjoy!