Blogs

Tags > oauth

Twitter kills the password anti-pattern, but at what cost?

It's good to see Twitter driving a stake into the heart of the password anti-pattern. But the Twitter ecosystem wouldn't exist if it hadn't been possible to sketch ideas, and to explore the unanticipated uses that can emerge from the soup of active ingredients that the web has become.

Get ready to create an Android Twitter app

If you're interested in learning how to build a Twitter app on your Android phone with Java then you'll want to check out our upcoming online course, Developing Android Applications with Java: Building a Twitter App, and you'll want to watch this screencast so you're ready to go on the first day of class.

What's going on with OAuth?

WRAP attempts to simplify the OAuth protocol, primarily by dropping the signatures, and replacing them with a requirement to acquire short lived tokens over SSL. It is not an even trade-off, and the new proposal has a different set of security characteristics, benefits, and shortcomings.

Up Close with an Enigma

At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take...

Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real

This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the...

MySpace's Data Availability is not Data Portability

Arguably vaporware, yesterday MySpace, Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket (also owned by News Corp), and Twitter announced the Data Availability Initiative. While I could write at length about how this shows the big companies have already realized how to diminish the DataPortability group's brand by linking anything they do "data portability", that isn't the point of this post. The crux of the...

Building Better Silos

It's been good to watch the use of OpenID spread. It's great to see that ma.gnolia.com has dropped "traditional login" in favor of OpenID. And I was encouraged to read about Yahoo's support of OpenID. Granted, it took me a while to get around to trying it. But when I got around to trying it, Yahoo!ID was a disappointment. The...