LinkLocker

Yesterday afternoon I found myself in the position of needing to call a national bank on the telephone in response to what turned out be a false fraud warning placed on my credit card account. Everything about the incident—from the fraud warning itself right up through the way the bank sought to resolve the problem—points to a systemic failure on the part of a huge and well-known financial institution to understand some of the most basic tenets of information security. These misapprehensions seem ...

Today we're releasing a public beta of the LinkLocker API. Authentication is handled by a straightforward and standard OAuth 2 implementation. All of the endpoints return easily parsable JSON, covering the full gamut of the service's features.

We believe the API is pretty stable at this point, but please do proceed with caution and lots of testing if you decide to start building some kind of public-facing app. If you should encounter any trouble along the way, please let us know!

Pinboard developer Maciej Cegłowski has announced that he has purchased bookmarking stalwart Del.icio.us for what amounts to a song. In a post on the Pinboard blog, Maciej explains that he plans on shuttering the service forever about two weeks from today, on June 15. The idea is to move the site into a read-only state at that time; current users will from then on be unable to create new bookmarks. Maciej helpfully suggests that these users give Pinboard a try, which is a fair enough suggestion for an acquirer to make.

Last week Manton Reece and Brent Simmons released a project called JSON Feed, news of which quickly made its way around the part of the Internet populated mainly by software developers. It's a new standard for content syndication on the Web--like RSS, but cleaner. It's a cool idea: XML (on which both RSS and Atom are based) isn't just ugly, it's also really irritating to parse. While it's a new spec and nobody's sure it will ever catch on ...

Algo, a project by Trail of Bits, is a VPN that you host yourself on a VPS of your own choosing. Self-hosted VPN's can be complicated to set up, but Algo is pretty easy: just download the files to your local machine, register for an account (if you don't have one already) at Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, or Google App Engine, and then run three commands in the terminal. That's pretty much it. In about 10 minutes, you have an easy, secure IPSec VPN.