SHTTP for dummies

SHTTP stands for Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It was created in 1995 by Enterprise Integration Technologies so as to ensure security with commercial transactions on the Internet.

It is an extension of the HTTP which is not supported by all servers and browsers and which has competitors such as SSL (Secure Sockets Layers). SSL tends to be the more widespread than SHTTP but they are not mutually incompatible. As a matter of fact the two can be used at the same time if the server allows them to run. Indeed SHTTP is design so as to secure the individual messages whereas SSL establishes a secure connection between two computers.

Computer network security is a pretty technical topic, if want to know more about it, check the website of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an organized activity of the Internet Society.

Carefulness is your best friend against cybercriminality

The development of online activities such as buying, doing money transfers involves a new area for criminal activities. The area of these crimes is virtual but the consequences are not, this is real money you can lose or your real identity that can be used by spiteful people.

There are many kinds of criminal activities that can be found online and their scope in terms of risks is really wide. Common cybercriminality that can be found on the web involves harmless activities – even though boring –such as spamming or lack of respect for intellectual property. Other web activities are definitely harmful: identity theft, phishing, cracking important data. This practice is not rare insofar as 15050 phishing incident were reported in 2005.

Identity is not tangible online, most of the time people are only know by their IP address and there is not security about is who online. By consequences, it is hard to prevent the integrity of people online once they gave away personal data. For example, phishing is a criminal activity that developed online which consists in stealing sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, and using them in order to extort money. For example, cyber criminals send emails or create a web page that look-alike with official ones – most of the time bank website.

Towards a customised and constantly updated newspaper

The acronym RSS refers to a family of web feed format such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0), Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) or RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0). A web feed is a data format used to update the content of the website to the users who subscribed to these sites. RSS and Atom are the most spread format available on the web.

What is the benefit the user can receive from using syndication? Mainly the user can receive directly the new contents of his favorite websites without losing the time to browse them. Syndication technologies do not only apply to text content but to all the media available online (weblogs, podcasts, vlogs). For example, you can receive automatically the last podcast of your favorite online musical show as soon as it has been put online.

Syndication turns to be the equivalent of a personal and constantly updated newspaper if you use an aggregator such as Netvibes. An aggregator (or feed reader) allows you to retrieve syndicated web content. Netbives is a great tool because it makes a link between syndication, Ajax technology (which allows users to organize their web portal the way the want. More and more users use Netvibes as their personalized homepage, it allows them to have a personal newspaper with the subject people are interested into and whose content is constantly updated.

Below, an example of a Netvibes hompage :