February 26, 2008
Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the two new small blue rectangular buttons on the Q-CERT home page. The "RSS" on these buttons stands for "Rich Site Summary." RSS feeds have become a widely used mechanism for timely distribution of information. They permit users to keep track of new items on hundreds of web sites without the need to visit the sites themselves and manually look for new items.
Q-CERT now has two RSS feeds. One of them is for alerts—the vulnerability announcements and current activity reports produced by Q-CERT's Watch and Warning team. By subscribing to this feed, Q-CERT readers can quickly see which new alerts are relevant to them. The second Q-CERT feed is for general announcements—events such as the ITU conference held last week or podcasts such as the one with Sami Al-Basheer Al Morshid. This feed will allow users to keep track of Q-CERT activity without constantly visiting the site.
If you haven't started using RSS feeds to make the best use of your news-reading time, maybe today should be the day. Modern web browsers make reading RSS feeds easy—simply click on those little blue icons.