AWS Zone Updated

The ever-popular AWS Zone site was recently updated to include better support for Amazon S3 and some of the other new services.

One especially cool new feature is the ability to compute signatures for requests in a safe manner. After entering your AWS Access Key and your AWS Secret Key, pressing the Generate Signature button will get the current time, and then compute the proper signature based on the request headers, the keys, and the timestamp. This feature is safe because it is done in the browser and your keys never leave your desktop.

This new addition greatly simplifies the process of making requests to secure services from within AWS Zone. You could also use it to debug and verify your own signing code, by checking to see that the site and your code produce the same results for the same inputs.

— Jeff;