lyncd

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 …

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 …