Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google wants your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL contacts. And they’re using the password anti-pattern to get them! Despite both Yahoo! and Hotmail (and Google themselves; not sure about AOL) offering a safe, OAuth-style API for retrieving contacts without asking for a password. This HAS to be a communications failure somewhere within Google. Big internet companies stand to lose the most from widespread abuse of the anti-pattern, because they’re the ones most likely to be targetted by phishers. Shameful.

# 15th September 2008, 10:39 am / aol, ffs, google, hotmail, oauth, passwordantipattern, phishing, security, shameful, yahoo

Find Your Friends. Flickr have added a characteristically classy friend import feature, pulling from Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail address books without any unhygienic password sharing. It’s a crying shame that the Yahoo! contacts API they are using isn’t available outside the company.

# 1st April 2008, 1:01 am / flickr, gmail, hotmail, passwordantipattern, portablesocialnetworks, yahoo

Migrating Microsoft Hotmail from FreeBSD to Microsoft Windows 2000. I’d like to see them try that with Yahoo!’s 100+ properties.

# 4th May 2007, 5:54 pm / freebsd, hotmail, microsoft, open-source, windows, yahoo