Blog @ Digital Bazaar

WebID – Universal Login for the Web

If there is one thing that is universal to all websites, it is the login process. Almost every website requires you to create an account, enter your e-mail address, verify your account, and log in before you can use any of the advanced features of the website.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a universal login mechanism for the web? One where you just had to click a login button and your browser would take care of filling out your account details? What if you didn’t need to remember different passwords to log into websites? What if we could do all of this and ensure that only you and the website you are communicating with would be able to see the data you are sending?

The good news is that there are some very smart people working on this problem. The solution is called WebID. The bad news is that there remained one problem that would take the browser vendors years to solve. That is, until Dave Longley (our CTO), discovered a way to make WebID work in all the current browsers in use today, including Internet Explorer.

Read more to find out how WebID will become the universal login for the Web…

Web Security: A JavaScript Implementation of TLS – Part 2

In the previous article that we did on a JavaScript implementation of TLS, we explained why we created Forge, which we released as open source software. To summarize, before Forge, there was no easy way to access a home computer using just JavaScript and Flash, technologies that exist in 98.9% of all browsers. With Forge, application providers such as Google Docs can now provide access to your home computer in a way that is safe and secure.

In this post, we will discuss how Forge came to be and the many technical issues that had to be solved to implement a JavaScript TLS client.

Read on to find out more…

Web Security: A JavaScript Implementation of TLS – Part 1

This blog post was written by Digital Bazaar’s CTO – Dave Longley.

Digital Bazaar has written a pure JavaScript TLS client implementation and released it as open source software. The project is called Forge.

To our knowledge a JavaScript implementation of TLS has never been done before. But, if you are a developer, you might be thinking: Wow, that sounds completely inane. Is this just another case of a bored developer engaged in an esoteric demonstration that something crazy is possible? It is useful. We promise.

If you are not a developer, you might be wondering what TLS is and what JavaScript has to do with it at all. Well, first, TLS stands for Transport Layer Security and is just the fancy name behind what makes “https” websites secure. You may have heard of SSL (Secure Socket Layer) before. TLS is the latest version of SSL and is more appropriately named because data does not have to travel over a “socket”, it can be transported in many different ways.

So why would someone think a JavaScript TLS implementation is useful?

Skip ahead to Part 2 of this article.

Myth Busting Web Stacks – PHP is Faster Than You Think

Lies, Damn Lies and Benchmarks. Software benchmarking is like trying to measure the individual performance of soccer players on a team and then using that information to predict how they will do in the World Cup. When there is a clear gap between the abilities of a novice and the abilities of a professional, the outcome is almost always predictable. Things get interesting, however, when you take professionals at the height of their careers and pit them against each other.

Benchmarking software follows the same philosophy. There are so many variables at play that it is often hard to predict how one set of benchmarks will play out in the real world. By forcing two state-of-the-art systems to their limits, we can learn about strengths and weaknesses in each system. Over the past week, we did a small project to benchmark the latest release of Monarch3 against Apache2 and PHP5.

We do this informally every few months in an attempt to see whether or not our LMM (Linux + Monarch + MySQL) Web Server stack is still outperforming the standard LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) stack used for the vast majority of the websites on the Internet. It is a common complaint on the Web that PHP performance is dismal and that Apache could be faster. What we found surprised us. We thought we knew the state of the art in Apache and PHP performance – we were wrong:

Read on to learn why PHP doesn’t suck as much as it used to…

Bitmunk 3.2.3 – Speed Improvements

It has only been one month since our last release; either we are getting good at building and releasing software, or we got lucky. We’ll let you decide. Improvements in this release include:

• Networking Speed – We have improved Monarch’s already impressive HTTP networking stack by greatly improving the number of simultaneous requests we can process per second. This not only improves the Bitmunk website, but all of the PaySwarm peer-to-peer software. Performance results will be published soon.
• Website Responsiveness – A number of changes have been made to reduce page load times. Javascript minimization and resource caching are just a few of the improvements.

Read on to learn more about the changes…

Bitmunk 3.2.2 – Good Relations and Ditching Apache+PHP

We are happy to announce the latest release of the Bitmunk Website and the PaySwarm software. It has been three months since our last release. This launch has a number of new features that are pretty exciting:

• Green Computing – We have replaced the standard Apache+PHP+Smarty web server stack with the Monarch Web server stack. This has improved performance by 468% and reduced the number of servers we need by a factor of 4. Reducing our carbon footprint by 4x is not only green, but greatly reduces long-term operating and maintenance costs as well.
• Semantic Web – We have published a new set of over 74 million pieces of machine-readable data in our pages, 11 million of which consist of pricing data via the Good Relations Vocabulary. We are using RDFa to publish the data.
• The Experience – Finding and buying what you want is now faster, with less annoying screens in the way between you and your music. The PaySwarm software now supports Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit versions).

Read on to find out more…

PaySwarming Goes Open Source

In December 2009 we released Monarch, an ultra-fast web application server framework, as an open source project. This month, we’re releasing a reference implementation of the PaySwarm web platform. That’s right, we’re releasing the Bitmunk Personal Edition source code!

The software that we are releasing today enables the people that create digital content to distribute it through the Web and receive payment directly from their fans and customers. It is also designed to help fans and customers distribute digital content on behalf of the content creators in a way that is both legal and financially beneficial to the creators, fans and customers. The technology is designed to be integrated directly into web browsers and web devices, finally making legal digital content distribution a first-class citizen on the web.

Read on to learn more about the source code, Bitmunk and PaySwarming…

Bitmunk 3.2.1 Released – Video and Data Sales

Bitmunk 3.2.1 was released this weekend, which included several bug fixes and the basis of two new really cool features.

While we were polishing the Bitmunk 3.2 release, we spent the time to make Firefox integration a bit cleaner:

• We now support Firefox 3.6.
• Only one tab is created for the Bitmunk Personal Edition software. That tab is focused whenever you purchase anything via Bitmunk
• Firefox will now auto-discover the page that you use to control your Bitmunk software.
• The interface has been made a bit more responsive.

Read on for more…

Monarch – Next Generation REST Web Services

Network-centric computing has been gaining significant mind-share over the past decade. We have started to shift our thinking of our computing environment from applications and documents that strictly reside on our personal computers to applications and documents that may reside on a variety of websites on the Internet. From Gmail, to Dropbox, to Facebook, to Twitter – the landscape of how we interact with computers is changing.

The companies that understand this shift to Web Services and build out technology to track this shift in usage will emerge as the leaders of the computing industry in the next several years. Their infrastructure will be a competitive advantage, specifically – how quickly and efficiently their developers will be able to grow their services while keeping costs down.

To help the industry take advantage of this shift, we have released Monarch as an open source project. Monarch is a state-of-the-art Web Services framework. It is used to build the core web services that a company will provide its customers. Scaling up and out while reducing costs will separate the market leaders from the rest of the pack – Monarch provides this competitive advantage.

Read on to learn more about Monarch.

Bitmunk 3.2 Launched – The Legal P2P Music Network

Today, we launched Bitmunk Personal Edition 3.2 – the first piece of software in the world to enable collaborative content distribution. Bitmunk is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser. This release adds the ability to sell DRM-free music from your computer, on behalf of artists, via an open, standards-based, peer-to-peer network.

We will be working toward standardizing this technology for web browsers over the next several years. This work will establish a world-wide, open mechanism for the distribution of digital content via web browsers that not only benefit artists, but fans as well. In short – when a file is traded using Bitmunk 3.2, the artist is paid and the fan is paid. You can legally resell the music you buy via the network and get paid for the bandwidth you contribute to the sale.

This is a bold new approach to music distribution. We certainly think it is inevitable that digital content will eventually be distributed in this way. Here’s how it works:

1. You find a song you want via the Bitmunk website.
2. You purchase the song using the latest Bitmunk Personal Edition software. When you buy a song on Bitmunk, the MP3 file pieces are downloaded from a number of P2P sources (just like BitTorrent). Unlike BitTorrent, getting commercial music through Bitmunk is perfectly legal.
3. The song that you bought, a DRM-free MP3, is added to your personal media library.
4. You are added as a download source for the song at a markup that you decide. Let’s say that markup is 10 cents.
5. When the song is downloaded from the network, you will get paid for each piece of the song that is downloaded from your computer. For example, if your markup is 10 cents, and there are 10 file pieces, you will get 1 cent per piece. So, if 5 pieces are downloaded from your computer, you will get 5 cents. If 7 pieces are downloaded from your computer, you will get 7 cents. While it may not sound like a great deal of money, there may be hundreds or thousands of people buying the song from you.

The artist will always get the royalties that they set for the song, but unlike all the major digital online music stores, you can get a cut of the sale as well.

We are really excited about this release as it is the culmination of years of research and development. Many tireless days, weeks and years of work have gone into addressing the many problems plaguing digital music distribution today. We think that getting the fans involved in the process of distributing music is at the heart of the solution and Bitmunk does just that – it gives people a reason to get involved and be rewarded for helping to distribute music on the Web.

If you would like to learn more about Bitmunk, take a look at the Introduction to Bitmunk page. If you’d like to try Bitmunk 3.2 out in Firefox, go to the Bitmunk downloads page.