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

Advantages of using PHP Programming:

• PHP programming is simple to use and implement
• The syntax of PHP is very similar to Pearl, Java and C
• PHP can be used with Unix, Microsoft windows, Linux and other operating systems
• PHP can be used for server-side scripting as well as command line scripting
• PHP can be used for creating code for dynamic and static web pages
• PHP can be used for writing desktop applications
• PHP is reliable, fast and stable
• PHP is a language that gets updated on a constant basis
• PHP can be used as a object-oriented programming tool or as a procedural programming tool
• PHP can support several web servers

ADVANTAGES OF PHP OVER ASP.NET

PHP and ASP have always been rivals in the programming world, even long before ASP.Net was released as ASP's successor. The ultimate answer to which is the better language rests largely in the developer and how the language is utilized.
Beyond developer comfort with a given language, there are several other more practical aspects to consider and I believe firmly that this is where PHP shines.

1. Cost
   When you look at the cost of a L.A.M.P (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) environment vs. IIS/ASP.Net, there are several factors to consider:
   
   1. Hardware Cost
      The requirements of running a L.A.M.P server are minimal; you can get away with a far less expensive machine than if you were installing an IIS/ASP.Net system.
      
   2. Software Cost
      In the Microsoft world you need to purchase a license for the server; you need to purchase a license for IIS; and you need to purchase a license for the SQL server. In the L.A.M.P world, there are no fees because all of the software is free and open source.
      
   3. Time
      Time is money and when it comes to rolling out a L.A.M.P server, I can personally get the job done in about an hour depending on the internet connection speed I'm using. In the hour it takes me to get a L.A.M.P server ready for deployment, you will probably find your Windows counterpart still installing security updates and software patches.
      
2. Resource Allocation
   A L.A.M.P environment uses considerably less of the server's resources which in turn allows the server to be used to host more web sites and use less memory than does the combination of IIS and ASP.Net. This advantage also means that the server running PHP can work more efficiently with less expensive, less powerful hardware.
   
3. Reliability
   Because the L.A.M.P combination is open source and community driven, so is the support and documentation that comes with it. Along with having a huge community for support, you also have software that is designed around standards compliance from top to bottom.
   
   While Microsoft has made great strides in standards compliance over the last few years, it is still a company that was built around proprietary formats and methods.
   
4. Ease of Development
   ASP.Net with Visual Studio or Sharp Develop (free) can be a very powerful combination for a developer. For simple applications, you can literally drag and drop your way through most of the development. Whether or not this damages the overall quality of the application you roll out is topic for another conversation, but I can honestly say that I prefer having full control over my software and that intimate knowledge with each line of code allows me to fix issues quickly and properly.

Why We Learn PHP-MYSQL

What language to learn

I don’t think that PHP is the best language to be learning programming with—if only because it makes no sense as a first language. It’s a haphazard language that was really designed to be the easiest second language to be picked up If you already know programming and want the shortest distance to apply that knowledge to the web.

But as a first language? Hell, the language confuses the heck out of me!

However, there was a recent estimate that there are 5 million PHP developers worldwide. If true, that’s an impressive number. It makes PHP one of the most popular languages in the world, and more so, because it is a language that takes a back seat to Java and C when taught in universities.

But why are there 5 million PHP developers worldwide?

I believe it’s because the web is all about immersion. You have an itch (making a website) that you want scratched, and PHP makes that scratching pretty darn easy—you can do just about anything most people can think to do on the web for about $10 a month to a LAMP hosting service and a couple good open source downloads—no other language comes close.

Then again, there are 5 million PHP developers out there. If you want a job, learning PHP is not enough of a unique experience to warrant a set of experiences that will be valued. And someone telling me that they “know PHP” doesn’t tell me anything other than that person has learned what mysql_connect and mysql_query do.

PHP: most popular server-side Web scripting technology

PHP Overtakes Microsoft's ASP as Web's #1 Server-side Scripting Language Enterprises Embrace Open-Source Technology for Dynamic Web Sites As Major Business Benefits Drive PHP's Explosive Growth Ramat Gan, Israel, June 4, 2002 - Zend Technologies Ltd., the creators of PHP 4, and the Zend Engine, on which all PHP sites are run, today announced that as of April 2002, PHP, the open-source software phenomenon, has surpassed Microsoft's ASP as the most popular server-side Web scripting technology on the Internet.


According to a Netcraft survey published in April 2002, PHP is now being used by over 24% of the sites on the Internet. Of the 37.6 million web sites reported worldwide (http://www.netcraft.com/Survey/index-200204.html), PHP is running on over 9 million sites and continues to grow at an explosive rate. Over the past two years PHP has averaged a 6.5% monthly growth rate.


PHP, a recursive acronym for "Hypertext Preprocessor", is an open-source server-side scripting language designed for creating robust and reliable dynamic Web pages for e-commerce and other mission critical Web applications. Inherent Advantages PHP's early growth can be attributed to its open-source roots as a free Web scripting technology that came bundled with the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) open-source quartet. Its new rapidly growing enterprise adoption for vital Web applications is now a direct result of PHP's three key advantages over competing technologies:

1. Designed for the Web - PHP has built-in features to handle heavily trafficked sites and to simplify common Web programming tasks.

2. Ease of Use - Companies gain enhanced productivity of development teams and significantly reduced time-to-market of mission critical web applications.

3. Open Source - Collaborative development leads to rapid technology advancement, superior code quality, a massive library of prewritten code, and comprehensive developer support and documentation.