Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 5th January 2009

Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility (via) Visualisation developed by the European Commission and the World Bank. # 1:24 pm

MemcacheDB. A server that speaks the memcache protocol but uses Berkeley DB for reliable persistent storage. Speedy: 20,000 writes/second and 60,000+ reads/second. Includes a full replication mechanism (with custom memcache protocol commands) based on Berkeley DB’s. # 12:37 pm

The username/password key’s major disadvantage is that it open all the doors to the house. The OAuth key only opens a couple doors; the scope of the credentials is limited. That’s a benefit, to be sure, but in Twitter’s case, a malicious application that registered for OAuth with both read and write privileges can do most evil things a user might be worried about.

Alex Payne # 10:47 am

Talking about OpenID. “So a relying party walks in to a bar...” # 10:46 am