Facebook Wants to Supply Your Internet Driver's License

And new security measures protect everyone's data.

Although it's not apparent to many, Facebook is in the process of transforming itself from the world's most popular social-media website into a critical part of the Internet's identity infrastructure. If it succeeds, Facebook and Facebook accounts will become an even bigger target for hackers.

As security professionals debate whether the Internet needs an "identity layer"—a uniform protocol for authenticating users' identities—a growing number of websites are voting with their code, adopting "Facebook Connect" as a way for anyone with a Facebook account to log into the site at the click of a button.

Facebook introduced Connect back in July 2008, offering third-party websites tools to coordinate with the user information that Facebook holds, including logins. Thus websites had the option of allowing Facebook users to identify themselves with their Facebook identities.

So, for instance, the Web statistics vendor Alexa gives new users the choice of creating an account by entering a username and a password or by simply clicking the "Connect with Facebook" button. Well-known websites that also use Connect include the Internet Movie Database, Ask.com, and ESPN. Others will almost certainly jump on the bandwagon in 2011.

Facebook's identity system might very well supply something that VeriSign, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google have all struggled to offer: a single "driver's license" for the Internet. (This leaves aside the question of whether it's a good thing for one company to hold such a position of power.)

A unique combination of factors makes Facebook well suited to being the repository for people's identities on the Internet. Unlike many popular websites, it requires users to register and log in. And Facebook's terms of service require that "users provide their real names and information"—indeed, Facebook has terminated accounts that were created with seemingly fake names or for fictional characters. Since Facebook users invest their accounts with a tremendous amount of durable personal content—including photographs, contact information, and connections to their social network—they are likely to keep a long-term relationship with the site.

This persistence of real identity puts Facebook in a position to solve one of the most pressing problems on the Internet today—the proliferation of user names and passwords.

Contrary to today's practice, there is no reason for most websites to force their users to create usernames and passwords. Most websites don't need or even want or need to manage the identities of their users—they simply want a way to reliably identify their users over time. Media websites, for instance, want to be able to attribute comments and limit spam. Personal-finance websites want to give users a way to monitor highly personal information securely—for example, a portfolio of stocks that the user might enter.

What's more, maintaining a user-identity infrastructure has its risks—as was made painfully clear last month when hackers broke into servers operated by Gawker Media and downloaded the user names and passwords for more than a million of Gawker's accounts. Even though the passwords were encrypted, many were easy to guess, so the accounts could be readily cracked, according to an analysis of the attack by security researchers at the University of Cambridge. Following the attack several unrelated websites, including LinkedIn and Woot, sent e-mail to their users warning them to change their passwords if these were the same ones as they used for Gawker.

Facebook Login lets any website on the planet use its identity infrastructure—and underlying security safeguards. It's easy to implement Facebook Login, simply by adding few lines of code to a web server. Once that change is made, the site's users will see a "Connect with Facebook" button. If they're already logged into Facebook (having recently visited the site), they can just click on it and they're in. If they haven't logged in recently, they are prompted for their Facebook user name and password.

An interesting side benefit for website operators is that Facebook Login provides the site with users' real names (in most cases) and

Moodle (LMS): Open Source Course Management System (CMS)

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It has become very popular among educators around the world as a tool for creating online dynamic web sites for their students. To work, it needs to be installed on a web server somewhere, either on one of your own computers or one at a web hosting company.

What is Moodle?

The focus of the Moodle project is always on giving educators the best tools to manage and promote learning, but there are many ways to use Moodle:

• Moodle has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and hundreds of thousands of students, yet it can also be used for a primary school or an education hobbyist.
• Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses (known as blended learning).
• Many of our users love to use the activity modules (such as forums, databases and wikis) to build richly collaborative communities of learning around their subject matter (in the social constructionist tradition), while others prefer to use Moodle as a way to deliver content to students (such as standard SCORM packages) and assess learning using assignments or quizzes.

► Moodle Docs

Demonstration site

Our demonstration site is a full Moodle site with some sample courses that you can try as a teacher, student or even an administrator. Don't worry about making a mess, the whole site is reset to a clean state every hour.

► Demonstration site

Moodle.org: Moodle Statistics

Registered sites49,648Countries210Courses3,797,365Users37,282,488Teachers1,139,595Enrolments18,139,837Forum posts62,451,536Resources33,471,786Quiz questions58,083,463

Benefits of CMS open source development for Web Design and Development

Benefits of CMS (content management system) are widespread still very few people know about it and use it to their advantage. In simple words CMS can be defined as an easy to use tool to manage the content on the site including its creation, publishing, distribution, management and discovery of corporate information. CMS open source development services are provided by distinct IT companies which specialize in open source development especially with PHP based technologies like Magento and Joomla.

Have you ever faced a situation when your website needs update and you are left with the task of doing it laboriously searching through the pages and then fitting in the update that is to be done then you are sure to understand the benefits of CMS open source development. A content management system is especially designed and developed to make easy all tasks related to website update and website change implementation.

Benefits of CMS open source development are manifold and sure to compel any online company to transfer its operations to a content management system. Future for CMS predicts that most of the large online websites will be using content management system and HTML will be used by only a handful of them with small businesses requiring a small website of just few pages.

Without further delay let’s take a look into the benefits of CMS open source development:

Editing becomes faster: In HTML pages editing would require use of some customized tool and can be done only by web developer. The process also required lot of time and involved some additional cost. This limitation is overrun by CMS open source development as it allows the site owner whether technically qualified or not to make the changes and make them live within minutes.

Quick redesigns: Templates are used for page design in CMS so redesigning becomes much easier and faster as only templates from the repository are to be used. With CMS open source development giving a new look to the website no more remains a daunting task and can be done in few minutes.

Faster Feature Integration: New template or page update would mean you will have to reuse, edit, delete or include new features. This can be easily done from the admin page of the website where often you will find drag and drop options to add or delete the features.

Graphics presentation: CMS open source development enhances and facilitates graphics presentation on the website. Rotating images, image galleries and Flash slideshows can be easily integrated using the admin panel and server.

Everyday website updates:  Apart from this content management system makes web maintenance easy and a daily process which can be done in less time. It is the most effective way to make the site interesting and look fresh every time. Previously website maintenance was considered a difficult task which can be performed only by a web specialist.

Advanced functionality: Features of CMS are so advanced that they have literally changed definition of web maintenance making it much easier and faster. It can help you perform tasks which are difficult or impossible to perform using HTML.

Improved code: Neatness in code is very important to ensure that the website functions flawlessly, occupies less web space and ranks good on the search engines. CMS open source development can help you have very neat code for your website which will ultimately result in its improved performance.

Return on Investment: Since most of the high quality CMS are open source you will have to hardly invest money to install and use CMS on your system, the benefits of which are of course going to be many fold to give you the best return on investment.

The need for a Content Management System

A Content Management System is a Web application that makes content authoring and delivery easy. It enables users to quickly and efficiently build, deploy, and maintain content-rich web sites by streamlining the web publishing process.

Content Management Systems can reduce the need for costly site maintenance and thus empower users to manage their own content.

Do-it-yourself: For clients those prefer to update and maintain their site themselves, a web content management system is the ideal solution. No knowledge of web design needed: Having a content management system ensures that the design of your website remains unchanged and the content can be updated without the need for programming or HTML knowledge. A Content Management System allows anyone with little or no experience in web design to update and maintain their own site. This is achieved through any computer connected to the Internet and without the need for additional client software. Centralized location: By using a Content Management System your organization can provide employees with a central location to provide and access up-to-date, accurate information and applications. This surely results in increased employee productivity which is critical to achieving the most streamlined business processes.