Articles

Personal Digital Archiving 2011 February 24 & 25, 2011 The Internet Archive, San Francisco http://personalarchiving.com We are pleased to announce that the Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference is now open for participation. We welcome proposals for session topics and speakers, as well as volunteers to help us organize and serve on site. Conference sessions will be selected by an international peer review panel that includes: Ben Gross, Highlands Group Brewster Kahle, The Internet Archive Cal Lee, University of North Carolina Cathy Marshall, Microsoft Research Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo! Research Jeff Ubois, The Bassetti Foundation Jeremy John, The British Library Relevant themes include but are not limited to family photographs and home movies; personal health and financial data; interface design for archives; scrap booking; social network data; institutional practices; genealogy; email, blogs and correspondence; and funding models. ...

Smartphone Network Connection Monitoring Tools for monitoring and modifying connections between web browsers and web servers are essential for debugging, testing, optimizing performance, and assessing vulnerabilities of web-based applications and native applications. Developers, security professionals, and anyone with an interest in gaining insight into the lower levels of web traffic commonly use these tools. There are many mature options for monitoring connections from desktop machines. Unfortunately, there are fewer tools to monitor connections on smartphones and these tools often require more complex configurations, as the monitoring software must run on a separate device. In this article, I present an overview of tools and methods for monitoring network connections on Smartphones including devices based on Apple’s iOS–iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Google’s Android OS, BlackBerry OS, and Symbian. This article focuses on inspecting HTTP and HTTPS traffic, although many of the tools and techniques described work equally well to analyze other protocols. ...

SSL De Facto for Securing Connections SSL, short for Secure Socket Layer, is a cryptographic protocol for securing network traffic that is the de facto mechanism for securing transactions on the web and many other protocols including email (SMTP/IMAP/POP), IM (Jabber/XMPP), VoIP (SIP), and SSL-based VPNs. The topic of SSL certificates is a bit arcane, but the much of security of our everyday online purchases depends on SSL. Yet, fewer services use SSL than one might hope. It is possible to buy a basic no-frills SSL certificates from a universally accepted certificate authority very inexpensively–less than $15 a year–if you shop around. In most cases, it makes no sense to use a self-signed certificate, to purchase a certificate from a second tier provider, or to purchase a chained certificate. This article is a substantial revision of an article in Messaging News from a few years ago. I receive some requests for an update and have also found an even more inexpensive provider in the meantime, which make the update worthwhile. ...

The OpenID authentication framework is the most well known of the federated user-centric identity systems. OpenID has effectively become the first commonplace single sign-on option for the Internet at large. Most sizeable Web-based service providers such as AOL, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, MySpace and Yahoo! have integrated at least limited support for OpenID. Services often run OpenID authentication side-by-side with their in-house developed authentication or as an alternate method of authentication. Once the user has authenticated via their OpenID provider, their credentials can be used to automatically sign the user into other services previously linked to their OpenID. Widespread support has made OpenID the de-facto authentication mechanism for low-value transactions on the Web. ...

Email is still one of the most convenient ways to quickly share links to friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, there are two major problems. First many people’s browsers are not configured to work correctly with their email client, especially for webmail. Second, many browsers only support emailing a link to the web page and not the entire web page. Furthermore, native support to email links is inconsistent and often formatted in a way that may break links for the recipient. I my Messaging News article a Better Way to Share Links in Email described these problems as well as a solution based on the free Readability bookmarklet that should work in nearly any browser and typically produces better results. ...

The White House announced The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) proposal and a NSTIC Fact Sheet on The White House blog. The NSTIC proposal (PDF) describes a plan to implement a federated online identity system with strong authentication. The document states the President expects to sign a final version in October 2010 and the strategy will likely significantly influence the government’s identity management efforts. In this post I will discuss the usability aspects of the proposal. ...

Pinboard is a bookmarking service that allows you to easily save, tag, annotate, share, and archive bookmarks independent of your browser. Pinboard describes itself as “antisocial bookmarking,” which highlights its capabilities as a private and personal archiving tool compared to the social features offered by Yahoo’s Delicious service. I find Pinboard a simple, fast, and reliable way for me to save bookmarks and archive web pages for future reference. I have been happily using the service for nearly five months (Update a year) and recommend it highly. ...

I take a lot of screenshots when I research products, both on the desktop and on the iPhone, so having some way to automate organizing my collection is important. The problem is that screenshots images taken with the iPhone have no EXIF metadata. This means there is no straightforward way to produce a list of all your screenshots. After a little bit of experimentation, I found a workable but not ideal solution. You can use the lack of EXIF metadata as conditions to group all the images. Screenshots are saved as PNG files on the original iPhone and the iPhone 3GS (the two models I had access to) and have no EXIF records. The only other metadata fields available are filename, file size, and modified, and imported dates. The PNG extension for the filename is the one existing feature you can search for, all others have to be unknown. I selected two features aperture and ISO, even though one would work in the hopes that this would reduce any false positives. ...

Notational Velocity is a free and open source note taking application for Mac OS X that is extremely simple, fast, and stable. I find the minimalist interface very functional and pleasant to use. It is one of my favorite applications. I mentioned Notational Velocity’s ability to sync with the Simplenote iPhone note taking application in my Messaging News Magazine column Great iPhone and iPad Apps for Reading and Sharing Docs. The combination of Notational Velocity and Simplenote allows me to create, edit, and manage notes that are seamlessly synchronized between my desktop and iPhone without worrying that I will have the latest version on the other device. ...

Instapaper, Dropbox, GoodReader, and Simplenote are my favorite applications for reading, writing, and sharing documents on the iPhone and the iPad. I have used each application for more than six months and I highly recommend all of them. Instapaper The Instapaper application makes it simple and pleasant to read lengthy articles on your mobile device. Instapaper is optimized for the type of articles where you find yourself starting in your browser and thinking, “I’d rather read this later”. The application automatically loads any new content from the Instapaper Web service, which reformats Web pages for small screens and strips away unnecessary elements. The service provides an experimental option to save pages formatted for the Kindle as well. ...