Montreal Tech Watch

The folks at Defensio, a new startup offering an anti-spam system, have just announced that Defensio now supports OpenID. In practice, this means users on a blog can now use their OpenID credentials to comment.

Mat Balez also explains this will increase the accuracy of the algorithm — I guess he means Defensio will aggregate comments left by a same OpenID user on various blogs, thus allowing their system to compute the level of spaminess of the user much easily.

For those wondering what OpenID really does, it’s an open standard which promises Internet users to have one unique login identifier throughout the websites he/she is using. Users get this identifier, typically a URL, at a provider, and future logins are each negotiated through a handshake. This week, Yahoo, then Google, have joined the standard, allowing their email users (in Yahoo’s case) and their blogger users (in Google’s case) to use their login credentials to access OpenID websites, making it avalaible to practically every Internet user.

It’s great to see Defensio being ahead of the curve. I’ve been a user of the wordpress plugin on MontrealTechWatch, and although I get the occassional spam getting through, the service gives an excellent performance, actually better than Akismet, as you can see below.

Another benefit Defensio has over Akismet is their API, which is very easy to implement.