Web Apps Watch - 2

* Hotmail single user code - Many services now use your phone number to send passcodes through text messages for additional authentication. Hotmail provides a disposable single-use code when you're browsing from a public internet connection. 

Wonder if this feature will come to Live Connect  (the new name for Microsoft's single sign-on Passport Authentication technique)? 

* Google Search miscalculates - If a Google Search result points to a question on a discussion Forum, it may display the number of answers.

The way it tries to guess may be faulty. The StackOverflow question link referenced in the result (shown in image above) has just one answer & four comments but Google counts it as 5 answers

* WebRTC can enable video chat without browser plugins -  Google's open sourced technology for real time communications, WebRTC, MAY be used on Google Hangout and Skype on the browser in the future. WebRTC will allow developers to create voice and video chat applications via simple HTML and JavaScript APIs.

* Google on a killing spree - Google will be closing iGoogle, Google Video, Google Talk Chatback, Google Mini, and the Symbian Search App. Last year it announced it plans to shutdown Google Translate, Transliterate & ten other APIs and disappointed a lot of developers. Will developers trust when they release their future APIs?

* Lesson to learn from LinkedIn's security breach - "LinkedIn was using an outdated form of cryptography to secure its users' private information. The company should have known better than to guard its lists with just SHA-1, experts say.

The problem with SHA-1 is that it translates the same text the same way each time. So if your password is "password" and your friend's password is also "password," they will be hashed exactly the same way. That makes reversing the process to uncover the original password
significantly easier.

That's why security experts recommend that companies with giant lists of private data like LinkedIn add another security layer called "salt."

Salt randomly adds another piece of information to the password. It could be a user name, first name, or even a random number -- the point is that it changes the underlying text enough to make it almost
impossible to decode."

* Placehold.it - an image placeholder service that generates a blank image with desired dimensions. Useful when you are designing a page but you don't have real images yet.

Also see:
Web Apps Watch - 1