Dave Supports Lock-in
February 27th, 2008 by EyeOnWinerWhat would Dave say if GMail suddenly required it’s own browser to access? Now suppose that, to ensure you were playing by the rules, Google added a new HTTP header that only it’s new browser knew about?
What would he do? He’d scream bloody murder, of course. He’d have a week-long bitch-fest about this horrible new “controversy” and wring his hands about trunks and lock-in and the end of the internet as we know it.
Imagine my surprise, then, to have received this email this afternoon from a tipster:
Dave hasn’t mentioned anything, but he is now requiring a secret hash in the request header to download the AP/AFP RSS feeds for FlickrFan. If anyone else (Apple, Google, Mike Arrington, etc) did something like that he’d call them out and accuse them of terrible things. It shits all over standards, I mean it’s a whole new HTTP header called Hash. But predictably it’s really easy to work around… Frontier script and DW aren’t a clever combination.
Thoughts?