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Flickr Machine Tags. A new feature for API developers that lets them stuff arbritrary namespaced key/value pairs in to tags and query them using the API. Even without range queries, this will enable a ton of exciting new third party developments.

# 24th January 2007, 7:54 pm / api, flickr, machinetags, tagging

MyOpenID: New anti-phishing tools available. Includes SafeSignIn, which removes the login form from the landing page. You have to enable it in your preferences though.

# 24th January 2007, 3:02 pm / myopenid, openid, phishing, scott-kveton

Pickles Begone. Barry Warsaw’s notes on adding SQLAlchemy persistence to Mailman.

# 23rd January 2007, 1:43 pm / barry-warsaw, mailman, python, sqlalchemy

Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots. Ned’s analysis of how spambots work, along with some relatively simple tricks that should fool most of them.

# 23rd January 2007, 1:39 pm / commentspam, hashing, ned-batchelder, spam, spambots

Twitter Updater (a WordPress plugin). “The Twitter Updater automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.” Fantastic idea—I really want this for my own site.

# 22nd January 2007, 11:12 pm / plugins, twitter, wordpress

On Space Art in Sebastopol... Awesome. Our giant mosaic space invaders are going to show up on Google Earth!

# 22nd January 2007, 10:44 pm / art, foocamp, google, google-earth, tom-coates

In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment. Convincing argument as to why desktop applications written in Java rarely have decent user interfaces.

# 22nd January 2007, 9:39 pm / java, ui, usability

Wikipedia nofollows links. Wikipedia’s high PageRank means this is likely to have a noticable knock-on effect on the rankings of many other sites.

# 22nd January 2007, 7:27 pm / nofollow, pagerank, wikipedia

Oxford Geek Nights. 8pm on the 7th of February 2007 at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Three 15 minute talks and a bunch of 5 minute microslots. I’ll be giving a talk on OpenID.

# 22nd January 2007, 7:22 pm / geeknights, openid, oxford, oxford-geek-nights, speaking

Ma.gnolia Blog: OpenID is Taking Off! Since November, 15% of new Ma.gnolia members signed up using an OpenID.

# 22nd January 2007, 6:41 pm / magnolia, openid

Group Membership Protocol. Martin Atkins’ proposal for a simple “is OpenID X a member of group Y?” protocol, useful for whitelists that can scale to handle large numbers of entries.

# 22nd January 2007, 8:27 am / martin-atkins, openid, whitelisting

Subtlety (via) Instantly create an RSS feed from a public subversion repository.

# 22nd January 2007, 8:20 am / rss, subversion, syndication

Anonymous OpenID. A mailinator-style service for OpenID. I’m glad someone’s built this; it reinforces the idea that an OpenID should not be trusted as an account without first using a verification step.

# 21st January 2007, 2:03 am / mailinator, openid

Phishing and OpenID: Bookmarks to the Rescue? Ping extends my proposal to use bookmarks as the principle authentication mechanism, resulting in a system that is much easier for people to understand.

# 21st January 2007, 1:36 am / bookmarks, ka-ping-yee, openid, phishing

Fork JavaScript. A great name for Yet Another JavaScript Library. This one tries to combine the best bits from YUI and Prototype.

# 20th January 2007, 11:39 pm / forkjavascript, javascript, prototype-js, yui

XMPP OpenID server. An OpenID provider that sends you a Jabber message when you try to log in, to help guard against phishing.

# 20th January 2007, 11:24 pm / openid, phishing, xmpp

MonsterID as Gravatar Fallback. Cute monsters created using a trick similar to Don Park’s 9-blocks. I like these more than gravatars.

# 20th January 2007, 11:21 pm / 9blocks, monsterid

Links to academic papers on phishing. Posted to the openid-general list by Mike Beltzner.

# 19th January 2007, 5:32 pm / openid, phishing

TagMaps. The toolkit behind the new YRB World Explorer, available to developers as a reusable Flash component.

# 19th January 2007, 10:01 am / flash, tagmaps, worldexplorer, yrb

Introducing: World Explorer and TagMaps. “Can we automatically extract information from Flickr geotagged images to create a rich visualization of the world we live in? The answer is: you bet.”

# 19th January 2007, 9:55 am / flickr, maps, tagging, yrb

MySpace Blocking Widgets? Making your business dependent on revenue from MySpace is sharecropping of the worst possible kind.

# 19th January 2007, 9:54 am / myspace, sharecropping, widgets

The NHL’s All-Star voting disaster. The NHL ran an online poll to decide which players are picked for their All-Star Game. The only authentication was a poorly implemented CAPTCHA. Unsurprisingly, it got gamed.

# 19th January 2007, 9:50 am / captchas, gaming, nhl, security, stupid

Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification. Smart (and pretty) trick for showing a representation tied to a commenter’s IP address without affecting their privacy.

# 18th January 2007, 4:55 pm / 9block, donpark, ip, privacy

Planet OpenID. Aggregating news about OpenID—surprisingly high traffic.

# 18th January 2007, 12:04 am / openid, planet

FIPA Abstract Architecture. Bill de hÓra shows how the work of the Intelligent Agents community relates to SOA / WS-*. We studied FIPA at University and the parallels to parts of the Web Service stack are pretty interesting.

# 17th January 2007, 11:32 pm / bill-de-hora, fipa, service-oriented-architecture, ai-agents

Mono-based device wins Best-of-Show at CES. “The Sansa Connect is running Linux as its operating system, and the whole application stack is built on Mono, running on an ARM processor.”

# 17th January 2007, 11:21 pm / ces, hardware, linux, mono, open-source

Inside MySpace.com. Case study of scaling against a network effect. Includes pretty honest coverage of the mistakes made along the way, although the article was put together second hand from conference presentations rather than from interviews.

# 17th January 2007, 9:18 am / myspace, scaling

MySpace: Too Much of a Good Thing? CSS customization really was just the result of forgetting to strip HTML. They “eventually” decided to filter out JavaScript(!)

# 17th January 2007, 9:09 am / css, javascript, myspace, security, xss

Gmail Atom feeds. Could be useful as a pipe for creating an e-mail interface to an existing Atom-consuming application.

# 16th January 2007, 2:50 pm / atom, gmail

New Dutch accessibility law. Sounds extremely forward thinking, designed by people who really understand the field. Just one problem: the guidelines are only available in Dutch!

# 16th January 2007, 12:59 pm / accessibility, dutch, guidelines, law, ppk

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