Tempted by blogs, spam becomes 'splog'

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Dangers of "Web 2.0"

Notice just HOW this happened:

"Then the splogger took the results, went to Blogger-BlogSpot and, using the service's application programming interface, or API, automatically created tens of thousands of blogs that contained text [...]"

This was something that could not have happened "pre-Web 2.0". Indeed, you know what this sounds like? It sounds a heck of a lot like all of those Office macros that were running around years ago. As soon as you release an API for a popular product, you've released a way for someone to abuse your product to the deteriment of others.

Number 1 security problem with Internet Explorer? Active X. What is Active X? It's more or less an API for accessing the user's system. It makes it easy to mess up someone's system when you have easy access to it. Remember when everyone was using Outlook APIs to get virii out there?

Anything with an API that doesn't have strict controls is going to get mangled, that's all there is to it. As soon as someone writes a little programming widget to read those "distorted text" graphics, we'll see a huge explosion in problems across the Web.I'm just waiting for someone to do this to Wikipedia (or Wikis in general). It shouldn't be too hard, even if they don't have an API, you should be able to build an easy to use API that turns your function calls into POSTs to a website and PRESTO, instantly detroyed wiki.

J.Ja

Posted by: Justin James   Posted on: 10/20/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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