by Infoble on August 23, 2011
If you regularly use RSS feeds to distribute content, chances are you’ve heard a thing or two about RSS security. The ability to protect digitally-distributed content is important to many publishers, and can be achieved by monitoring subscribers. Secure media distribution is possible by using a combination of techniques, which can be classified using the categories of encryption, authentication, and authorization.
Encryption is important in secure media distribution for the reason that, even with a well-monitored list of subscribers, content is still susceptible to interception by a hacker between the client and server. The way to defeat this is by making sure the data being sent is encrypted while it’s being transported. By using SSL and HTTP authorization, publishers can be sure that their data is protected and available only to the subscribers they’ve authorized to access it.
One of the most basic and important aspects of secure media distribution is authentication. This essentially means monitoring who is receiving the content that is being published. This can be achieved easily by using HTTP authentication, which is the same method used by members-only websites to protect paid or security-sensitive content. It’s a tried-and-true method, and is widely supported by RSS aggregators.
Finally, publishers should concern themselves with authorization. By using authentication, the publisher now knows the users that are requesting access to their content. Authorization is simply deciding which of these users they’re going to allow access to. Because RSS feeds are primarily transported by HTTP, publishers can use HTTP authorization to accomplish this. There are other ways in which authorization is important, such as preventing the sharing of copyrighted content. These methods and others can seem daunting to a publisher who isn’t well-versed in web security, but there are third-party methods to handle all of these tasks, creating a secure environment in which to distribute content. Infoble’s media distribution tools, OrbitFeed and OrbitFlow, provide such security.
by Infoble on August 4, 2011
In the past decade, podcasts have emerged as an extremely popular means of distributing audio or visual content. Although individual files are often referred to as a “podcast”, the term actually refers to a series of audio or video files, each file being one episode of that series. Because of the episodic nature of podcasts, subscribers need a way to regularly receive each installment without having to seek them out every time a new one is released. In order to accomplish this, the subscriber will use a podcast client, which allows them to subscribe to a feed; this is the basic idea of podcast distribution. There is a wide array of podcast clients, or podcatchers, available for every platform. The most popular though, is Apple’s iTunes, which rose to prominence after adding the podcatching feature in 2004.
Podcast clients work by searching the internet for a specific file, called an RSS feed. RSS officially stands for “RDF Site Summary”, but is widely used as an abbreviation for “Really Simple Syndication.” The RSS feed is a file that contains the information a podcast client needs in order to receive the syndicated content a user wishes to subscribe to. RSS data feeds can distribute different types of information; originally, they were used to distribute posts to blog subscribers. Later, they came to be used as a means of distributing information about and file locations of audio or video files, or podcasts. The podcast client reads that information, and uses it to download the latest files of the series. In this way, subscribers are able to receive the content they want automatically.
Thanks to podcast distribution, starting up a podcast requires only a means to record the media, and a server to host the files. The low start-up cost has enabled thousands of people to produce and distribute work that, in the past, would have required the support of a national radio or television network. Subscribers benefit greatly from this technology as well; now they have the ability to receive free content from an incredible number of providers without the hassle of seeking it out for download week after week.
