Four short links: 18 November 2009

Web Time Travel, UK Map Data Liberation, Streetview Mashups, 3D Retail

1. Memento: Time Travel for the Web -- clever versioning hack that uses HTTP's content negotiation to negotiate about the date!
2. Ordnance Survey Maps to Go Online -- The prime minister said that by April he hoped a consultation would be completed on the free provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000, (not the scale of a typical Landranger map set at 1:25,000). The online maps would be free to all, including commercial users who, previously, had to acquire expensive and restrictive licences at £5,000 per usage, a fee many entrepreneurs felt was too high. No word yet on license. (more details here)
3. Mapsicle -- open source Javascript library to create mashups and application on Google Streetview, from NZ developers Project X. It has been released by Google as part of the Maps Utility library.
4. Freedom of Creation Shop -- online store for 3D-printed objects. (via Makezine).

Four short links: 2 November 2009

Inside Botnets, Creating Choropleths, Privacy Simplified, Massively Machiavellian Online Social Gaming

1. Your Botnet is My Botnet (PDF) -- 2008 USENIX Security paper analysing >70G of data gathered when security researchers hijacked the Torpig botnet. A major limitation of analyzing a botnet from the inside is the limited view. Most current botnets use stripped-down IRC or HTTP servers as their command and control channels, and it is not possible to make reliable statements about other bots. In particular, it is difficult to determine the size of the botnet or the amount and nature of the sensitive data that is stolen. One way to overcome this limitation is to “hijack” the entire botnet, typically by seizing control of the C&C channel. [...] As a result, whenever a bot resolves a domain (or URL) to connect to its C&C server, the connection is redirected or sinkholed. This provides the defender with a complete view of all IPs that attempt to connect to the C&C server as well as interesting information that the bots might send..
2. cartographer.js -- build thematic maps using Google Maps. To be precise, you can build a choropleth, which is my word of the day. (via Simon Willison)
3. Making Privacy Policies Not Suck (Aza Raskin) -- interested in developing a standard set of privacy policy components the way that Creative Commons has created a standard set of copyright license components.
4. Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell (TechCrunch) -- many of those games on Facebook that your friends play are evil. To get in-game money or objects, they'll let you take a survey but at the end you're signed up for crap you never wanted. Related: this article on monetizing social networks which talks about social gaming's business model.

Playnice: The Unofficial Latitude for the iPhone

Last week Google launched Latitude for the iPhone as a web app. They were held back from releasing a native app by Apple's overbearing application approval process. However, this doesn't matter that much as all location apps are currently hamstrung by Apple's lack of background location updates. Luckily for iPhone customers there are developers out there trying to solve this problem.

Nat Friedman has released playnice on Github, a piece of code that will let any MobileMe & iPhone customer update their Google Latitude account. The PHP script is designed to be run as a chron job for scheduled updates. To use it you must activate the Latitude gadget on iGoogle and turn on the Find My iPhone feature on your MobileMe subscription. Playnice uses Tyler Hall's Sosumi code from Github (Radar post) and there is no reason that similar code couldn't be written to update Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite or any other location service hamstrung by the iPhone's lack of a location service. Since Latitude has only released a Read-only API (Radar post) the writing of your location to Latitude was done via screenscraping. [Disclosure: I was given a one-year subscription to MobileMe by Apple]

I find it silly that Google was asked not to release a native app. When you use Latitude for the iPhone in the browser it does detect your location and can display your friends' locations. It is almost the same as a native application.

On the other hand I have to marvel that they were able to release it in a browser and I view as a technical triumph. Getting the user's location from the browser was not possible 6 months ago. The fact that it is now possible to access location every modern mobile browser (Fennec, Opera, Safari, Android), desktop browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE8) plus Windows 7 and Snow Leopard is huge. Location and maps no longer demand a native app to be useable so perhaps Apple's application approval team is just ahead of the times and is purposefully trying to drive app developers to the browser.

[via Hacker News]

Four short links: 27 July 2009

1. Ignite OSCON -- 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They're all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
2. gheat -- a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
3. CaDNAno -- open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church's projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. CommentPress -- an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I'm taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing "edit this page". (via gov2.net.au's issues paper)