Comments on: Weave: Browser bookmark & password syncing The Right Way

By: Wicher

Wicher — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:42:25 +0000

Weave hit 1.0. There's a rather good article on LWN.net.

By: Wicher

Wicher — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 13:21:34 +0000

1) The either-trust-someone-or-read-the-source argument is often made. There are chains of trust everywhere, and they can be broken. For instance, I’ll just have to trust the SSL CA’s, but I don’t inspect their security procedures personally.
In this case, I trust the Weave code and repository since their Mozilla’s (and they are already making my browser anyway). But even if I read the Firefox and Weave source, my compiler could’ve been compromised.
Your point is valid though. It is a matter of how far one’s paranoia takes one, and to be completely sure you’ll have to establish the integrity of your compiler (and kernel, and hardware) before actually compiling anything, including the compiler itself, so there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here ;-)

2) You’re right about the discontinuation catch. It’s a matter of migration costs. For many home users with simple needs and setups, those costs may be minimal.

3) I’m hoping on some interesting Weave developments. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could share/sync some of my saved passwords with you by encrypting them with your public key? Or how about if I could selectively ‘push’ bookmarks to peers, right from my ‘add bookmark’ interface? Social bookmarking on steroids.

By: marius

marius — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:55:10 +0000

The catch is in the details.
You still have to trust Weave code and its repository. Are you inspecting the source? Do you trust the binary from repository?
Actually Google was offering a similar tool, but they simply discontinued a year or so ago.
I was waiting for Weave to come out, but it tooks them so long that Xmarks took over the market.
So the catch is that the owner of the server might discontinue the service, and to be frank, I don’t see a business model here.
I think Xmarks is feeding on mining the bookmark data, perhaps they mine browsing history a bit too (they provide additional info about visited sites on demand) and making this as a kind of social networking.
I haven’t seen anything annoying from Xmarks yet, it is silent and I barely notice its work.

By: obrama

obrama — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:17:04 +0000

I’ve always been using Xmarks (formerly named foxmarks), which does the job at forms and bookmarks syncronizing. Lately they’ve added some anoying features (bloat) though and I’m very interested in weave, since I expect it to do very well.