Don’t get me wrong here, I think that AJAX is as cool as everyone else out there. Cool effects and time saving abilities. But is it also a cause for security concerns, too. It appears that for some, it could be.

If data is more openly available as XML over HTTP, it’s going to be pretty damn easy for a smart hacker to get access to that data to make applications like this impressive example… which is great, but undoubtedly someone eventually will feel like their data is being “stolen” or “misused”.

Reverse engineering HTML was easy from the very beginning because Mosaic and then Netscape had a feature that allowed you to view the source code of any HTML page. And since it’s very easy to watch HTTP traffic going back and forth out of your desktop computer using things like Live HTTP Headers or Ethereal. Anybody with a few choice Perl modules can screen-scrape data from a web page and reuse it in another application. For example, let’s just say that I wanted to make an RSS feed of guests on the David Letterman show. I could easily write some code to parse the CBS Late Show homepage to get the data that I want. It’s easy and it’s great, but am I stealing CBS’s data? Getting concensus around an answer to that question is tricky unless the content is specifically licensed for such use. Source: Whirlycott

Tags: rss, html, xml, ajax, netscape, http, cbs