The Internet's Top 10 Most Controversial Figures of 2008

• Internet
• security
• cyber warfare
• hacking

Name /// Brad Fitzpatrick

Age /// 29

Location ///San Francisco

Association /// Software designer at Google

Reputation /// Fitzpatrick is the brainiac behind OpenID, an emerging Web standard that aims to replace the myriad user names and passwords needed to access different sites with a single Web address tied to the user's online identity.

Inside the Controversy /// Hundreds of millions of people around the world share personal details on largely disconnected social-networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. But what if there were no virtual walls between these communities, allowing your various online personas to follow you around from site to site?

In Fitzpatrick's world, Netizens would no longer flock to the popular social-networking site du jour, but instead would build their own peer-to-peer-type social networks that would coalesce around the site tied to their OpenID.

"I'm sick of going to some Web site and not having my friends there already," Fitzpatrick says. "There's a new popular social networking site every six months. I'd like to end that."

When you log in with an OpenID, you do so using a third-party identity provider for validation. So far, AOL, BBC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, MySpace, Verisign, Yandex and Yahoo have signed up as providers.

While privacy wonks may balk at the concept of more personal data trailing us online, Fitzpatrick maintains that OpenID actually affords people greater privacy control, for example, by allowing users to separate their personal and professional online personas.

CLICK FOR MORE: The Internet's Top 10 Most Controversial Figures of 2008
Dan Kaminsky	Julian Assange	Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey	Charlie Miller	Brad Fitzpatrick
HD Moore	Jon Lech Johansen, aka "DVD Jon"	Joe Stewart	Jacob Appelbaum

PM contributor Brian Krebs is The Washington Post's computer security reporter. Check out his daily blog, Security Fix, right here.

3. RE: The Internet's Top 10 Most Controversial Figures of 2008
Website: http://stores.lulu.com/aspnovelist
I have always believed that some day hackers would be bold enough and smart enough to hack into our country's major infrastructure like electricity, the Internet among others and cause a major catastrophe. In fact, I have written a book with such a scenario where a powerful group take over the power grid and cell phone network and hold the US hostage. Check it out at http://stores.lulu.com/aspnovelist if you like.

2. RE: The Internet's Top 10 Most Controversial Figures of 2008
The "reputation" section of Jon Lech Johansen, aka "DVD Jon" is actually for HD Moore.

1. RE: The Internet's Top 10 Most Controversial Figures of 2008
But still the US government thinks a British Nerd with a fixation on UFO's who didn't damage a single computer is worth extraditing on terrorist laws to the US to face 70 yrs in jail, basically exposed security flaws they should have paied a consultant to find!

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