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Technology

Use Let’s Encrypt to add an SSL certificate to your Dreamhost-hosted site

Update 2/2016: You don’t need to follow any of the instructions in this post any more! You can just enable a Let’s Encrypt certificate in the Dreamhost panel! But if you want to generate your own Let’s Encrypt certificate locally and add it to your site, keep reading, original post follows …

EFF’s Let’s Encrypt initiative just made getting a free, CA-signed server certificate easier than it’s ever been before. Running a single command generates everything you need, obtains the public cert and even installs it into your webserver of choice. So let’s encrypt, and move the web closer to HTTPS everywhere!

Here’s a quick tutorial for using Let’s Encrypt with Dreamhost’s shared hosting. It’s not quite automatic, since you’ll have to copy-paste 3 things into boxes via the Dreamhost web panel, but it’s a lot simpler than the alternatives. As someone who’s done this the old way countless times, Let’s Encrypt was shockingly easy! more …

Filed under: Code, Systems, Technology.  Tagged: , , , .

Innovation in Lossless Compression: Apple’s LZFSE, Google’s Brotli and Yann Collet’s Zstandard

With Google’s recent open-sourcing of Brotli following on the heels of Apple’s announcement of LZFSE, it’s an exciting time in the lossless compression world, as new compression schemes tuned for specific use cases now appear to offer substantial enough benefits to challenge the venerable ZIP/Deflate as the Internet’s transport compression algorithm of choice.

Of course, Deflate and its most widespread implementation, zlib, aren’t dead yet, not by a long shot. But what these new LZ77 algorithms offer is significant enough performance gains to justify widespread implementation, and adoption by the W3C. And they have the backing of companies such as Google and Apple, which means they’ll ship on tens of millions of devices and browser installs. more …

Outernet’s solar-powered content downloader, Lantern

In the age of the Internet of Things, it is interesting to see a non-Internet device that uses Web technologies in a new way. Outernet is a project started earlier this year by the nonprofit Media Development Investment Fund that buys bandwidth on communications satellites to do one-way broadcast of news, education and other critical content worldwide.

Already available to anyone willing to do a little work with off-the-shelf hardware like Raspbery Pi, Outernet now have an integrated, solar-powered receiver called Lantern that doubles as a charger, theoretically enabling offline, anonymous read-only access to Web content anywhere in the world. more …

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I love my Android, but Android Market security is another story

Yesterday, Google revealed that it had used its “security of last resort” remote removal feature this week to wipe 58 malicious applications from user’s devices.

Google also removed the bad apps from the Android Market, contacted law enforcement, and is pushing a security update to protect devices’ identification codes. Needless to say, these are all good moves, and unlike some privacy advocates I’m not going to quibble with Google’s remote app removal power as long as it’s being used conservatively, in a security context, as in this case. Analogous to public health or combatting botnets, Google must be able to wipe malware from people’s phones to protect everyone, not just the infected.

What does bother me about this news is that these applications appeared in the Android Market at all, where they were available for some time before being reported to the Android security team. I’ve owned an Android phone for a couple of months now, so I thought I’d weigh in on one of the sad realities of the experience: I find myself increasingly worried about security, certainly more so than I have been about any personal computing device since the last time I ran a Windows PC 10 years ago. more …

Filed under: Technology.  Tagged: , , .

FCC opens up spectrum for public use

We all won a huge victory yesterday when the FCC allocated a huge swath of radio spectrum for public use, which means that after analog TV goes away, any company or hobbyist will be able to use these frequencies. It’s a much wider range of spectrum than what’s available for public use today (the narrow frequencies things like your cordless phone and 802.11 wifi use), so a whole new class of high-bandwidth applications is going to become possible.

What does that mean exactly? Well, the most awesome part is that we don’t even know yet. But don’t be surprised to see, say, 1-gigabit wifi that makes 802.11 look like dial-up or wireless HDMI so that the video game or Hulu video you were about to see on your laptop screen shows up on your flat screen TV, too. Imagine the data connection and streaming video on your mobile phone 100 times faster, and imagine not having to go through one of the big 4 wireless carriers to get it! more …

Filed under: Technology.  Tagged: , .