Articles in "Prototype Framework"
Blogging is Hard
So, I've learned, over the last few weeks, a new respect for professional bloggers. Blogging is hard. If nothing else, it's somewhat difficult to get the creative juices flowing for this blog at times, but I'm hoping to do better in June. It's my first month; hopefully, even the blogging greats out there were slow off the starting block.
I ran into a great post from PHP::Impact that offered up 30 Useful PHP Classes and Components that they've encountered. I was familiar with a number of them, but a new one stood out: the PHP Universal Feed Generator.
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I've always re-coded feeds from scratch or relied on the internals of third-party blogging software to handle feed generation for me. However, after looking at the information on the PHP Universal Feed Generator, I'm excited to use it for upcoming projects. Looks like I know what I'm tweaking when I work on this site over the weekend!
Data Security in a Digital Age
Bruce Schneier has a wonderful essay up at wired.com today about data security. From the article:
Whoever controls our data can decide whether we can get a bank loan, on an airplane or into a country. Or what sort of discount we get from a merchant, or even how we're treated by customer support.... If a criminal can get hold of enough of our data, he can open credit cards in our names, siphon money out of our investment accounts, even sell our property. Identity theft is the ultimate proof that control of our data means control of our life.
We need to take back our data.
The protection of personal data is something I'm faced with freqently and something I take very seriously. In many cases, it seem to me like people collect too much private information. Why, for example, would you need to enter your birthday to signup for a newsletter. And, even if there is an age requirement for the newsletter, you could always lie about your birthday and, thus, circumvent such "security" measures.
Mr. Schneier goes on to say that it will take years to get to a point where we can truly "take back our data." I agree it will take time, but I think it's up to us -- the web developers of the world -- to truly analyze the data that we collect and make sure that we take the appropraite steps to secure it. Only in that way will we move toward a world where our data is within our control.
