Twitter uses OAuth as its supported form of authentication. This is fine for some apps like clients where users need to authenticate themselves, but it doesn’t work well for bots or scripts run by one person. If the bot needs an access token, it can be a real pain to obtain without writing the intermediate code.

This application, OAuthery, serves a simple purpose. You supply it the consumer key and secret for your OAuth application. It creates a request token and the URL for authorizing it. You complete the authorization in a web browser and get a PIN number. You then enter that PIN number back into the application, and it spits out your access key and secret. At this point, the user authentication is complete, and you can add those credentials to your script, and access API resources.

This is largely intended as a developer tool for people developing applications with Twitter’s OAuth impelmentation. It also provides code to show exactly how to perform the authentication process with OAuth and Twitter, so that developers who wish to implement such functionality in their own apps can use this as reference.

This one is for all of those developers out there who scoff at JavaScript. This is a working neural network algorithm in JavaScript used for ripping apart CAPTCHA images (in this case, from Megaupload) and deciphering them. This is really sophisticated stuff, and even though Megaupload has some pretty easy CAPTCHAs, this should be pretty easily adaptable to other CAPTCHAs.

Amit Singh, creator of MacFUSE, has just released an experimental version of XBinary, which allows the Mac OS X kernel to execute binary types other than Mach-O. Examples of using this include executing ELF binaries, PDP-11, Java jar files, and Windows executables.

I’m probably going to try tackling Haskell this year as my new learning project, and there’s quite a bit of useful information in there.

The EFF is submitting requests for DMCA exemptions to the US Copyright Office. Among others, they are asking for an exemption for iPhone owners to be able to jailbreak their own devices.

Note that this is different from exempting the iPhone Dev Team, who create and distribute the jailbreaking solution, from lawsuit and/or persecution under the DMCA. This is solely for iPhone owners to do what they want with the device they paid for.

While the WebOS SDK is not yet publicly available, Palm is seeding it to select developers. One of them came forth yesterday to talk to Ars about the new Palm device, OS, and Mojo framework.

A lot of people have been asking for this on #iphonedev, so here’s a snippet for making a thumbnail of a CGImage.

Apparently they left the admin site completely open to the world, and the URL was sniffed out by someone in the audience at Macworld.