Webware

On Friday, photo host Flickr introduced a slight tweak to the way users are able to geotag their photos.

Clicking on the "add to your map" option on the right side of any photo now pops up a mini Yahoo Map with an address finder. Previously, users were required to go into Flickr's somewhat complicated Organizr tool and add geotags en masse. If it's your first time using the Flickr map to geotag your photos, you'll still need to hit the Organizr, but only to change the initial privacy settings.

I've already used the system on a handful of photos, and it's far more efficient for one-off shots than using the Organizr tool. However, if you're planning to geotag three or more shots, it might be worth it to stick with the Organizr if only for its batch-editing capabilities.

To help speed up the process of tagging your photos with the new pop-over map, there's a new recommendation system that will suggest landmark locations or neighborhoods, based on where you've dragged your shot. If the system has any potentially overlapping areas, they'll be listed as suggestions that you can simply click on to re-map your shot. I found this to work well with things like parks or general neighborhoods, but for businesses you're out of luck.

On a side note, if you're an iPhone user and wondering why photos you've uploaded to Flickr via e-mail are not showing up on Flickr's map (despite having geocodes in the EXIF data) it seems some of that geodata is being stripped out by Apple before it hits Flickr. To upload shots from your phone without having that information stripped, you can use several third-party Flickr uploaders that tie into Flickr, like AirMe or Flickup.

You can now geo-tag photos right on top of any photo you're looking at. It'll also recommend places nearby in case you're trying to remember where you shot the picture.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

On Thursday, Mozilla pushed out a new security update for its new Firefox browser. Version 3.0.1 for Windows and Mac addresses vulnerabilities in malformed GIF files on Mac OS X, command-line URLs that could launch multiple tabs when Firefox is not running, and a potential remote code execution by overflowing CSS reference counter.

Meanwhile, Mozilla updated the earlier version of Firefox with 2.0.16 on Tuesday. The update addresses two of the Firefox 3 critical issues--command-line URLs and overflowing CSS reference counter.

Version-specific updates have been pushed out automatically to existing Firefox users.

Mozilla will continue to update Firefox 2 until mid-December.

Reddit, the social news site that publishing giant Conde Nast acquired in 2006, has made a big announcement: The site's code, as of Wednesday, is open source. It's been released under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).

The Reddit alien mascot. 'You can play with me now!'

"We'll leave it to the users and see what they come up with," co-founder Steve Huffman told CNET News.com in an interview when asked what the site expected would happen. But more than anything, he's hoping users will tweak some of what they want to see changed and add new features. Social news sites like Reddit and Digg are often home to extremely opinionated communities, and by making its code open-source, Reddit will be able to let those users work on the site themselves to an extent rather than repeatedly petitioning for changes.

"It was kind of an easy decision for us," Huffman explained. "One of our driving goals is to stay as open and transparent as possible and give our users an alternative to mainstream media...this is just the next logical step toward that goal of opening up the actual system." He added that he was surprised that Conde Nast was so quick to approve Reddit's proposal to go open-source.

Reddit now counts 4.5 million unique visitors monthly, significantly smaller than rivals Digg and Yahoo Buzz. But the site has grown 1,000 percent since the acquisition by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division, Huffman said. And its open-source move is something that none of its competitors is doing, he emphasized.

Growth of news aggregation start-ups, however, could take a hit when the frenzy over the 2008 U.S. election is over. "I'm not too worried about it," Huffman said. "I think traffic will definitely change a little. We've seen that in smaller scales already. We saw when the Ron Paul movement kind of came and went...when Ron Paul kind of cooled down, a lot of those users left but the traffic stayed up."

Reddit has a history of openness, too. Last year, to celebrate its acquisition, the company toured around the country giving away free beer.

In looking for a program to back up his Gmail account, programmer Dustin Brooks found a commercial program that instead copies username and password information, according to a blog on Codinghorror.com.

Over the weekend, Brooks said in an e-mail to CodingHorrror.com that he was looking for a program that would archive his Gmail account onto his local hard drive. He signed up for a program called G-Archiver distributed by Mate Media of Miami, Fla. Brooks says that after installing the program, it didn't do all he was looking for so he decided to reverse engineer the source code using a program called Reflector for .Net.

Inside the source code Brooks found the program author's e-mail address and account password for Gmail. Thinking that was a little strange, Brooks used the hardcoded information to open John Terry's Gmail account. There, Brooks alleges he found 1,777 messages, all of which had username and passwords for people who signed up for the G-Archiver, including his own. In other words, whenever anyone signed up for the program, as Brooks had, a copy of his or her username and password was sent to John Terry's Gmail account.

Hardcoding e-mail addresses isn't new. In a presentation at Black Hat D.C. 2008 a few weeks ago, researchers Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios reported that phishing site creators frequently hardcode e-mail addresses into the code in order to receive copies of the personal information submitted independent of where the Web form is being sent.

Brooks says upon realizing what each of the e-mails contained, he then deleted all the mail and emptied the trash. He then changed the author's password, and reported jterry79@gmail.com's abuse to Google.

On the CodingHorror.com site this morning, Brooks wrote "Granted my actions may have been a little quick and harsh, I was a little upset over the whole deal. I have a lot of personal info in my account along with a stored credit card for Google checkout. I very easily just could have changed my password and been done with it, but I didn't want more people compromising their accounts as well. The only e-mails in this account were usernames/passwords. This wasn't a personal account used for other things."

A number of sites have since removed G-Archiver from their download collection, including CNET Download.com. Attempts to contact Mate Media have so far gone unanswered.

Of the companies I saw yesterday at the Under the Radar: Mobility conference (more stories), the most audacious, and therefore my favorite, was Zoove. This company makes a service and a technology that allows mobile phone users to dial a short code (preceded by **) and then receive information via SMS or e-mail.

Sounds like SMS short codes, right? But there's a big difference: to get data from the Zoove service, you dial your phone. That is you press a code, like "**coke," then the Talk key. It's just like making a call. Except that instead of talking to a person, you get sent the information you're requesting.

Sending a short code is a lot more involved: you have to go to your messaging window, address the message (the short code), and then, most likely, enter a message keyword. Only then can you send off your message. Zoove "StarStar" codes take no training and are faster to use. They'll work better on billboards.

Zoove has data showing how much more likely users are to complete the task of sending a StartStar code than competing a short code SMS message, and how much more satisfying the experience is. It is, undoubtedly, a better way to request information by mobile phone. But the beauty of the business is Zoove's lock on the technology. Getting Zoove implemented requires making deals with carriers, and according to CEO Tim Jemison, implementation by a carrier is not trivial. This is a good thing, since it's a barrier to competitors. Also, for patent and for technological reasons having to do with the way big phone switches work, Jemison says that once Zoove is installed by a carrier, it is even more difficult for it to adopt a competing short-dial-code provider in parallel.

So the first audacious part of this business is that it only really works when all (or nearly all) of the carriers in a market support the technology. Zoove doesn't have that part of its message locked up just yet. Currently, Zoove is running on Sprint, and talks are underway with AT&T and Verizon Communications, Jemison said. Without these (and other) carriers, selling StarStar codes will be tough. And ultimately, that's the business.

The other big part of the Zoove vision is that Zoove controls the StarStar "namespace." If GM wants to license **Vette, for example, only Zoove can enable it. That puts a lot of power in Zoove's hands, and it takes guts to sell a product through carriers that represents a revenue stream that they don't necessarily benefit from and could turn off in a heartbeat, leaving Zoove with no air to breathe.

Zoove is a big vision, and that's why I like it. Delivering on the vision will be very difficult, though, and that just makes it more interesting.

The presidential crawl back and forth across the country is less of a race and more of a marathon. At this point, there are a lot of candidates on both sides, and likewise an onslaught of news coverage. To help keep track of it all, there's a new site, aptly named Map the Candidates, which does just that. It's a Google maps mashup of where candidates are, and what they're doing in the form of news feeds and video clips.

Each candidate gets an icon to match their campaign branding, and various map markers around the country let you know what they're up to and where it's taking place. The tool will mash up news stories, and links to their sources, alongside upcoming campaign events. The neatest feature, however, is the embedded YouTube clips of candidate speeches and local news coverage that have been geocoded to show you where it happened. You can watch the entire video without leaving the site.

There are several ways to tweak what you see on the map. You can pick which candidates you want to view, or drop an entire side, like the Republicans or Democrats. Each candidate gets their own profile page as well, aggregating how many times they've visited each state alongside a news feed containing stories and videos on all the recorded campaign stops they've made.

Keep in mind if you're looking for breaking news, local campaign issues, and deep analysis, you're better off visiting a special political coverage page on major news outlets. In the meantime, this is a handy tool to see where the candidates have clustered.

See what and where candidates are on the U.S. campaign trail.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Mashable, the blog about social networks, launched Mashcodes last week, a sister site devoted to HTML codes for MySpace, blogs, and other social networks that support custom code. The move complements Mashable's coverage of these sites, and Mashcodes is easier to navigate and has fewer annoying ads than competing MySpace code sites like MyProfilePimp and MySpace-Codes.com.

Mashcodes' MySpace profile editor

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The first thing I wanted to do after joining MySpace was get custom code for my profile. To my surprise, nearly all of the sites I pulled up on a casual Google search had a ton of pop-ups, off-site links, annoying ads, and plain ol' clutter. Mashcodes on the other hand is fairly simple, and all of its tools keep you within the site. One of the coolest tools on Mashcodes is the profile editor. It uses a simple WYSIWYG interface to let you change every aspect of your profile, without touching any sort of HTML code whatsoever. Any changes you make are mirrored instantly, and it takes just a few minutes to tweak it just the way you want it.

A lot of the content on Mashcodes hasn't been designed in house. Graphics, videos, widgets, and some of the tools can be found on other sites. What separates Mashcodes from other MySpace code sites is an ease of use that I think the novice MySpace user is going to love.