Experiments with GeoRSS
As you may know, I work at Ublip, Inc., a GPS tracking provider. One of our goals at Ublip is to incorporate Web 2.0 principals into our product offering. Most GPS tracking services have a walled garden so that you have no way of getting your data out if you want to use it elsewhere.
One of the technologies we are experimenting with to this end is GeoRSS which is a way of adding location information to RSS feeds. However, one of the issues that we have to deal with is security and privacy. Most customers would not want to make the real-time location of their vehicles publicly available, although there are some cases where that does make sense. I recently implemented a GeoRSS feed with Basic HTTP authentication over HTTPS. This is reasonably secure and supported by most RSS readers. However, when I went looking for a GeoRSS client that supported it, I came up empty.
Mapufacture has expressed an interest in supporting it in the future. We are discussing how this might be accomplished.
I had some success with Yahoo! Pipes. After some digging, I figured out that Pipes will support http authentication if you encode the URL as http://username:password@feed.url. However, I ran into two problems here. First, our usernames are email addresses and the @ caused a problem, however this was easily solved by escaping it as %40. The second problem is that https doesn’t seem to work. I have yet to figure out if this is just a limitation of Pipes or not.
Here is what the pipe looked like first in the editor, and then while running. You’ll need to click on them to be able to read anything.
Of course, the big problem here is that my username and password are encoded in the pipe. If I publish the pipe, everyone can see them. If I don’t publish the pipe, Yahoo guarantees a level of security through obscurity. The URL for the pipe is secret and not indexed. This level of security is not good enough for an application, but it was an interesting experiment.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Hi,
We are aware of the problem you mention on the last paragraph and there’s something in the very near future that will alleviate this.
Thanks
Jonathan
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:58 am
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