Security - We will get there

I am a fan of nba and check out the score at http://www.nba.com from time to time. I am always amazed by the flashy tech used at the site and impressed with their performance even under the huge load just you can imagine. But today it's different. The home page looks normal but there is connection error when I click the game detail link. Here is the screen shots.

I've been involved into the identity management a while ago and heard OpenID as a "a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet." 

Basically it's a free, open and distributed framework for user authentication. There is extension to add more value into this framework such as creating user profile automatically by  having additional user information.