If you ask me, most school and corporate policies on network monitoring and filtering are totalitarian and excessively pervasive. The Right is so concerned with silly traditional values and keeping objectionable content away from their vanilla-bland offspring that most corporations, by default, coerce their system administrators to violate one of the core guarantees of the Internet. A few weeks ago, three Chinese guys submitted a draft to the IETF. They proposed a laughable system in which each country controlled its own DNS namespace, so that each municipality had autonomy over the resolution of domain names for the sake of keeping up with the “fast development of the Internet” as if… go on →
Nobody will bother to hand you an introduction to HTTPS/SSL. Casual netizens recognize the green lock by the address bar well enough, but deeper technical knowledge can be inaccessible to programmers who are accustomed to a simple HTTP/1.1 transaction. Here’s what I’ve learned exploring HTTPS: Welcome. There, I said it. HTTP and it’s cousin HTTPS are just two of many communication protocols that are the application layer protocols. A protocol is nothing scary, just a set of rules. Other communication protocols include FTP, SMTP, OSCAR (for AIM), IRC, and Morse Code. They determine how two computer should exchange information with each other. A large part of this communication is actually… go on →