Holidays around the corner and that just means that I have a lot more time to work on some new hobby project. It is Gmail gadgets this time and I am thinking about writing a couple of them. Here is what I have in mind, and lets see how it materializes. Please do drop in your ideas and suggestions to add features to the gadgets - adding ideas during the ideation phase is the easiest :)
1. Gmail IDS:
Presently, Gmail shows the location of last login, but it is usually limited to the last five log in attempts. The last five login attempts tend to cover a day and hence, I do not really have information about my usage of gmail. Hence, I am planning to come up with a gadget that records Gmail sessions over a longer period, in addition to storing the IP address, Browser details etc. This is along the lines of Sneak-O-Scope for social networks. Once we have the login data, we can also write IDS systems that calculate the risk of login and alert a user when Gmail is accessed by a potential attacker - "a weird IP and a totally different browser". The alert can be over SMS and I am planning to leverage Google Calendar. While we are at it, I also thought of saving the user sessions at Calendar instead of our database, giving user, full control of the data.
2. Gmail 2 factor authentication
Talking about security, I would always love to have two factor authentication for my Google Accounts. As a humble start, a gadget could try incorporating this. The gadget would load and send an SMS to the user with a random token. The gadget would then change the top.location to a login page where the user would have to enter the token code send over the SMS. Once the token code is accepted, the user can continue back to the gmail session.
Both the use cases are not 100% secure as they would not work on Gmail basic; an attacker can simply switch to the basic version (or even access POP and IMAP) to get the mails of the user. Also, since we rely on Google Calendar for alerts, an attacker with the user credentials can simply turn off all alerts from calendar.
Achieving 100% security would require a lot of co-operation from google, but lets just go ahead and work on this, for the sake of curiosity as to how far the ideas go.
Planning to use GData Python Client library, Google App Engine, YUI and the building blocks.
Bookmarking with Ubiquity - automatic tags
I had written about a YAHOO pipe that uses a service to generate tag automatically a few days back. I am now using the service to automatically generate tags for the ubiquity command I was working on.
The pipes is configured to spit out JSON output and all I do is iterate through it the tags and place them in the POST I make to delicious. The tags are space delimited. The biggest advantage of adding automatic tags is its ability to make the bookmarked sites easy to search. I am also looking for services that can index only my delicious pages and search through them. I was looking to make an A9 search xml and add it to my search box to help me recollect resources I have seen. This is infact, a "better-privacy" approach over what infoaxe provides.
The pipes is configured to spit out JSON output and all I do is iterate through it the tags and place them in the POST I make to delicious. The tags are space delimited. The biggest advantage of adding automatic tags is its ability to make the bookmarked sites easy to search. I am also looking for services that can index only my delicious pages and search through them. I was looking to make an A9 search xml and add it to my search box to help me recollect resources I have seen. This is infact, a "better-privacy" approach over what infoaxe provides.
Yahoo Pipe to get tags for a webpage
I had earlier written about a ubiquity command that helped in quickly bookmarking pages. The command posted the bookmark to delicious with the selected text as notes. The command does not support tags yet.
Adding tags manually was always a turn off; that is the reason I was searching for online tag generators for web pages. I wanted some service to which we could pass a url, and it would return a list of tags for the page. I did come across many but none were in a form to be used directly.
Here is a YAHOO pipe that generates Tags when a website is mentioned. I use the Tag Cloud Seeder page to generate the tags and then parse it using pipes.
The parsing has to be a little more streamlined and I am currently working on it. Once this service is done, it would be the way to generate tags for the ubiquity command.
Adding tags manually was always a turn off; that is the reason I was searching for online tag generators for web pages. I wanted some service to which we could pass a url, and it would return a list of tags for the page. I did come across many but none were in a form to be used directly.
Here is a YAHOO pipe that generates Tags when a website is mentioned. I use the Tag Cloud Seeder page to generate the tags and then parse it using pipes.
The parsing has to be a little more streamlined and I am currently working on it. Once this service is done, it would be the way to generate tags for the ubiquity command.
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