Simon Willison’s Weblog

The password anti-pattern. What I don’t understand is why Google / Yahoo! / other webmail providers haven’t just deployed a simple OAuth-style API for accessing the address book. Sites have been scraping them for years anyway; surely it’s better to offer an official API than continue to see users hand out their passwords? # 12th October 2007, 9:25 am

BarCampLondon3. 24th-25th of November in Google’s London offices (by Victoria train station). The last BarCamp London was a blast—I’m really looking forward to this. # 10th October 2007, 5:20 pm

Google Maps, HTML version. Google’s mostly undocumented accessible version of Google Maps. Robin Christopherson demonstrated this yesterday at FOWA. # 4th October 2007, 9:31 am

Google GMail E-mail Hijack Technique. Apparently Gmail has a CSRF vulnerability that lets malicious sites add new filters to your filter list—meaning an attacker could add a rule that forwards all messages to them without your knowledge. # 27th September 2007, 10:29 am

Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google. Stories like this crop up every now and then, but no one ever seems to mention that the Google Toolbar has been doing this since it was released (more than five years ago) provided you have PageRank display turned on. # 25th September 2007, 11:04 pm

Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5. “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.” # 21st September 2007, 11:23 pm

Google Maps API gets clickable polylines and polygons. Interesting explanation of how they optimised calculating the distance to the nearest point on a polyline. # 8th September 2007, 12:58 pm

XFML (via) Throwing the new home for the XFML specification some Google juice; the domain name got nabbed by a squatter. # 30th August 2007, 10:27 pm

Ganeti (via) New from Google (developed in the Zurich office): virtual server management tool designed to “facilitate cluster management”, built on top of Xen. # 30th August 2007, 9:51 pm

Google Web Toolkit: Towards a better web. Good overview of why GWT exists, but I take exception to the title: requiring JavaScript to even display something does not make the web “better”. # 29th August 2007, 8:21 pm

An update on Google Video feedback. Google are now offering a real refund to everyone who bought a video, and are letting people keep the Google Checkout credit as well. Purchased videos will keep working for six months. # 21st August 2007, 7:54 am

Brighton geek venues. Nat’s latest project: a neat Google Maps mashup listing venues for geek events in Brighton, managed using Google MyMaps to edit a KML file. # 16th August 2007, 1:38 am

Microformats in Google Maps (via) No doubt thanks to the influence of Kevin Marks. # 31st July 2007, 11:36 pm

tesseract-ocr. Open source OCR, sponsored by Google. I just sat in on a talk on this at OSCON and the complexity of the problem is pretty incredible. # 26th July 2007, 8:23 pm

YouTube Scalability Talk. Kyle Cordes’ notes on a Google Tech Talk on scaling YouTube by Cuong Do. # 14th July 2007, 10:26 pm

Google Translate (beta). Google’s beta translator based on statistical analysis of things like the United Nations corpus. I have no idea how long this has been available; it isn’t linked from their homepage. # 3rd July 2007, 4:43 pm

Google Health Advertising Blog: My opinion and Google’s (via) A follow up to the post I linked to earlier. # 1st July 2007, 9:22 pm

Does negative press make you Sicko? (via) Google’s Health Advertising Blog encourages the healthcare industry to buy ads against Sicko as part of an “issue management campaign” to help “educate” the public. Creepy. # 30th June 2007, 6 pm

My Google Tech Talk on OpenID. I gave this extended and improved version of my “Implications of OpenID” talk at Google on Monday. Fast turnaround on the video! # 28th June 2007, 8 am

google-diff-match-patch (via) Robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text, in Java, JavaScript and Python. # 9th June 2007, 6:15 pm

Semi-synchronous replication for MySQL (via) Google’s patch for MySQL which enables more reliable master-slave replication (a transaction isn’t committed until at least one slave has replicated the data). # 5th June 2007, 10:07 pm

Google Gears DB Abstractions. Here come the ORMs. # 4th June 2007, 8:54 am

Cross Domain Frame Communication with Fragment Identifiers. Google are using this crazy iframe/fragment trick for their new Mapplets API. # 31st May 2007, 2:15 pm

Apollo will include Google Gears technology. Looks like Google really worked on the partnerships for this one. # 31st May 2007, 8:30 am

Dojo Offline on Google Gears. “The great news is that the Dojo crew were in the loop wrt this project, and Brad has ported Dojo Offline to use Google Gears as the base platform.” # 31st May 2007, 8:28 am

RSS Bling goes Offline with Google Gears. Google Gears is Google’s new offline JavaScript framework. Dion Almaer (a Google employee) has a nice example of code using Google Gears on Ajaxian. # 31st May 2007, 8:27 am

The Google Maps Street View team? They’re posing outside the Googleplex so I’m guessing this is the team that built it. # 30th May 2007, 12:29 pm

Howto: Google Maps Street View outside US. Add “&gl=us” at the end of the URL to avoid the evil geo IP restriction and play with Google’s latest toy. # 30th May 2007, 7:40 am