Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 January 1

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January 1

Noob looking for help with Javascript

First of all, Happy New Year everyone. I want to add the TimeAgo JavaScript to my website. But I'm a total noob. I see the website has a "Download" link. Okay, so I download the JavaScript code. What am I supposed to do with it now? Upload it somewhere on my own site? Thanks.--94.215.21.230 (talk) 10:59, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

From the link, it looks like the TimeAgo program uses the JQuery library, which you will need to download and install. The page you linked to provides examples of how to invoke the program from a web page: basically, JavaScript code is either added to an HTML file with the <script> tag, or it is included from an external file. W3Schools (at [1]) has a good introduction to JavaScript: if you've ever programmed before, you can pick it up in an afternoon. OldTimeNESter (talk) 20:55, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Htaccess rewrite rule in apache

I want to redirect: (1) http://mydomain.com/xyz to http://mydomain.com/mypage.php?url=xyz (2) http://mydomain.com/xyz/pqr to http://mydomain.com/mypage.php?url=xyz/pq (3) http://mydomain.com/xyz.jpg to http://mydomain.com/mypage.php?url=xyz.jpg

Only if the specified url doesn't exists. What can be htaccess rule or is there any other way? AmRit GhiMire 'Ranjit' (talk) 13:28, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Email = postcard?

According to electronic envelope: ". Just like the postcard, where any postal worker handling the mail can read its contents, any server operator and programs from governments can read your E-mail (also "email")."

I thought that the email servers would communicate through secure means with each other. OsmanRF34 (talk) 16:53, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Nope. That would require transport layer security, and the technology that we call email does not use it.

In principle, some email servers may choose to use secure transport sockets for some or all of the communication. But that type of security is not a technical requirement. In general, if you use email, you should assume that the message can be sent in plaintext across network links that you do not control.

This is why the technology Pretty Good Privacy, and its free software alternative GNU Privacy Guard, were created. These technologies allow you to provide encryption at the application layer. When you use such tools, you first encrypt your message securely, and then it is usually encoded in base 64 text and sent via email. That code text is still transmitted and received in "plain text," but because it was already encrypted, its plaintext form is meaningless unless the recipient has the key to decode and decrypt it back into the real plaintext message.

For comparison, technologies like Jabber do permit end-to-end transport layer security (provided that you correctly manage security settings and share the necessary keys securely). Conceivably, you could create a software application that looks and feels exactly like email, but is implemented under the hood by Jabber technology. The hard part would be getting an organization to adopt this technology. Email continues to exist - and will persist for many many years after better technologies can replace it - because unsecure communication is very convenient, and most organizations do not have the wherewithal to force a transition. Nimur (talk) 18:39, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

I work in IT for a international financial institution and we user TLS between servers, so the messages are encrypted over the network. HOWEVER I would like to add that it is actually a legal requirement that we be able to retrieve, recover and inspect company email in case of legal dispute or regulatory requirements. So we have to be able to read the email sent to and from our email servers. There are of course restrictions and approvals that need to take place before that happens, not anyone can just log on and do it, but we don't encrypt emails end to end not because we haven't bothered to 'adopt this technology', but because it is a legal requirement for us not to do so. Vespine (talk) 22:33, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Even if connections between email servers always used SSL/TLS or another secure transport, each server would still see the plaintext of the email. The servers are the postal workers in this analogy. -- BenRG (talk) 23:02, 3 January 2014 (UTC)