Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 10th August 2022

Let websites framebust out of native apps (via) Adrian Holovaty makes a compelling case that it is Not OK that we allow native mobile apps to embed our websites in their own browsers, including the ability for them to modify and intercept those pages (it turned out today that Instagram injects extra JavaScript into pages loaded within the Instagram in-app browser). He compares this to frame-busting on the regular web, and proposes that the X-Frame-Options: DENY header which browsers support to prevent a page from being framed should be upgraded to apply to native embedded browsers as well.

I’m not convinced that reusing X-Frame-Options: DENY would be the best approach—I think it would break too many existing legitimate uses—but a similar option (or a similar header) specifically for native apps which causes pages to load in the native OS browser instead sounds like a fantastic idea to me. # 10:29 pm

Introducing sqlite-http: A SQLite extension for making HTTP requests (via) Characteristically thoughtful SQLite extension from Alex, following his sqlite-html extension from a few days ago. sqlite-http lets you make HTTP requests from SQLite—both as a SQL function that returns a string, and as a table-valued SQL function that lets you independently access the body, headers and even the timing data for the request.

This write-up is excellent: it provides interactive demos but also shows how additional SQLite extensions such as the new-to-me “define” extension can be combined with sqlite-http to create custom functions for parsing and processing HTML. # 10:22 pm

How SQLite Helps You Do ACID (via) Ben Johnson’s series of posts explaining the internals of SQLite continues with a deep look at how the rollback journal works. I’m learning SO much from this series. # 3:39 pm

curl-impersonate (via) “A special build of curl that can impersonate the four major browsers: Chrome, Edge, Safari & Firefox. curl-impersonate is able to perform TLS and HTTP handshakes that are identical to that of a real browser.”

I hadn’t realized that it’s become increasingly common for sites to use fingerprinting of TLS and HTTP handshakes to block crawlers. curl-impersonate attempts to impersonate browsers much more accurately, using tricks like compiling with Firefox’s nss TLS library and Chrome’s BoringSSL. # 3:34 pm

2022 » August

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