Leah Rowe has written an interesting article about the history of the Libreboot project on the project's 10th anniversary. Recommended reading if you're interested in the open source firmware ecosystem.
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Today, Let's Encrypt announced that they are enabling an extension to DNS CAA records known as ACME-CAA ( RFC 8657 ). This came as a surprise to me, but a very pleasant one, since I wrote the ACME-CAA specification back in 2016 with Let's Encrypt in mind, and it was finally published as RFC 8657 back in 2019. To my…
Today we seem to be living through a war on passwords. This is manifested in various ways; in its most passive form, it takes the form of people blogging about how passwords are bad. The more material changes are the general trend towards no longer treating passwords as a sufficient condition for access in favour of…
Early websites. In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files.
If you were deciding on whether to use AWS, Azure or Google Cloud for a production application, what factors would you use to make the decision? There are probably many such factors you might think of, but I'd like to point out one that probably isn't commonly considered: the relative trustworthiness of Google's…
In 1996, XML was invented. No sooner than it was created, it was adopted for all manner of misconceived applications for which it was a poor choice.
Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to…
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
In 2009, the W3C cancelled the development of the proposed successor of XHTML, XHTML2.
Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built…
Nowadays, there is an epidemic of web applications purporting to offer “end-to-end” encryption. Examples might range from a file upload service, which allows you to upload and share files of arbitrary size and promises “end-to-end encryption”; or a web-based password safe service which claims that it can't see your…
In Unix, everything is a file. This is often viewed as a positive, but it's often a poor abstraction for many things. This discussion goes into some of the issues.
When you invoke a function in an imperative programming language, you pass arguments to that function. But that function may also operate on global mutable state, meaning there are other factors in the operation of that function than merely the arguments you pass to it. To some extent this kind of contextual, implicit…