ReadWriteWeb

A company who believes they have the solution to our online security woes is Yubico, makers of a small USB dongle known as the Yubikey. This ingenious authentication solution can be combined with OpenID or other third party web sites to provide secure authentication on the web.

Authentication is an area of security that is more important than ever, especially since we're now using the web to access all sorts of private data, from personal communications to online banking sites. Yet as those services become more sophisticated and complex, so do the techniques used by criminals wanting access to our private information. Although many of these sites force you to create strong passwords, a password alone is not your best defense against identity thieves. For the best security, multi-factor authentication is needed, and that's what Yubikey provides.

You are not the center of the universe, especially on the internet. That's the lesson that even the biggest web brands are learning fast, and we expect to see widespread cultural changes occur right along side their learning.

One week after we wrote about the leaked screenshots that have since been confirmed as the forthcoming home page design of AOL.com, where 3rd party content and functionality is now welcome to come on in through the front door, now Yahoo! is telling the press that its home page will soon be home to far more content from outside the Yahoo! network than ever before. The era of the walled garden is over.

If you have not yet checked out the online sensation Garfield Minus Garfield, you have been missing out. Launched in February of 2008, this comic is a unique version of Jim Davis' "Garfield" which provides an entirely different vantage point on Jon Arbuckle's life simply by removing the lasagna-loving cat from all the frames. Without Garfield, the comic is no longer a silly strip for children but instead reveals "the existential angst..of Mr. Jon Arbuckle...as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb," says the creator, Dan Walsh.

oEmbed is a newly released spec from Cal Henderson (of Flickr), Mike Malone and Leah Culver (of Pownce), and Richard Crowley (of OpenDNS) that allows web sites to quickly and easily embed media when a user posts a link directly to that resource. oEmbed is an open format which standardizes the process of embedding photos, videos, links, or other media and circumvents the media provider's API (or the need for screen scraping if they don't offer one). It works by turning a link to, say, a photo or video into XML or JSON that tells the user how to embed that media.

George Bush signed a $555 billion omnibus spending bill yesterday that included a huge victory for advocates of open science on the internet. All research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency with a $29 billion research budget, will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal.

This should open up a whole world of new opportunities for online research. Readers outside of the academic world but aware of the financial future of health information online in the commercial sector can imagine the analogous excitement about this announcement for academic researchers.