The Paragon Initiative has a recent post to their blog that's kicking off a new series of posts called "Slice of PIE". In these posts they hope to provide answers in a Q&A style, answering questions commonly asked of them via Twitter or other means.

Astute readers have noticed that our blog posts have decreased in frequency this year. We put a heavy emphasis on quality, not so much on quantity.

At the same time, we field a lot of questions on social media, where our answers (and, sometimes, the questions themselves) are difficult to locate, especially when people close or lock their accounts.

With both of these thoughts in mind, I asked my Twitter followers if they'd be interested in a Q&A-style blog series. I expected maybe a 55:45 split on yes/no responses, but the final tally was overwhelmingly "Yes".

So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce the pilot for our new series, Slice of PIE.

In this inaugural edition they start by sharing how readers can get their questions answered and what kinds of questions will be answered. To kick things off they answer a question about the use of asymmetric encryption and comparing it to hybrid encryption.

On WebReference.om today Leidago Noabeb has kicked off a series with part one of his look at encryption in PHP applications and how it can keen you from ending up like him.

Recently, an attacker hacked into my database and stole all the passwords and usernames stored there. Needless to say, I had to change everything and it cost me time and money. What made the crime easy for the attacker is that I never encrypted any of the passwords in the database. I've learned my lesson and now I'm passing along that wisdom with this article about encryption in PHP. Using some of the encryption techniques that PHP offers, you can safeguard your information in various ways.

He lays the foundation for the series by talking about three different kinds of encryption that can help you protect your data - one-way encryption, symmetric (using a key) and asymmetric (shared key locking).