Is Your Widget Sick?

Call the Widget Doctor! There are widgets out there that are vulnerable to attack. Triggering the vulnerability might not take an e-mail, but involve a network attack, or, maybe, a malicious blog post, a photo description, or some interaction on a social networking site. Or the widget itself might come from a malicious source. (as I found out the hard way with a Twitter widget)

The point here is that we're dealing with a shift in what Web-style programming can achieve -- and that that shift does not come without risk, and responsibility. A shift, incidentally, that extends beyond just Widgets, as Web technology is also becoming the programming platform of choice for mobile devices, and as the capabilities of Web applications that run in the classical browser are extended, more trained widget doctors will be needed.