Mashup Camp - Day 2

Today was the last day of Mashup Camp and it was the shortest day. I started with the presentation on Amazon web services. Very interesting, Amazon has so much beyond selling books going on now ;)

They discussed the S3 service which is basically virtual hard disk space. It's very cost-effective apparently, so I'm going to give it a try and upload all my digital photos there as a backup. I spent the last few hours trying out the S3 services and mapping a drive to S3 and creating a URL link to a file on S3. I'll post on that tomorrow perhaps. The company Mashery (http://www.mashery.com/) announced in the meeting they use S3 to store all their backups. The presenter continued talking about their other services such as EC2 which is virtual servers. They have Linux and MySQL available as virtual servers and he mentioned it cost 10 cents per hours which came out to roughly $72 per month.

I went next to a discussion on Mashup security which was quite interesting for me because of my security background. I am an officer in the Web Application Security Consortium (http://www.webappsec.org/). The discussion focused on a few topics. First the need for a framework for session management. A mashup today requires you to enter the credentials of any other web services with accounts you want to access. Is there a way to change how this trust works? A ticket-granting service like Kerberos? Everyone seemed to be looking to OpenID as a start to a solution. Another issue was the security of the browser. There was talk about whether the browser can and should be trusted but no real conclusions there. The session leader was an ex-security researcher from nCircle, one of the leading security assessment companies out there.

Overall Mashup Camp was a great experience and I meet a ton of people. Hopefully Techrigy will be showcasing our stuff at the next Mashup Camp!