Search Results for: protocol

Ars Technica has a longish post on the state of play regarding HTTPS. What it's good for, what it's not, who is pushing it, how browsers are reading it, etc.

The present humble website converted to https a couple of years ago after the divine Google decreed that it would be giving search preference to such sites. Since it's Google, there had to be an ulterior motive; the Ars article says it's because Google's competitors can't scrape search results from https -- is that true -- how creepy is that.

Being hustled in this fashion was horrible but for tommoody.us the only downside has been (i) paying some additional cash for the certificate and an IP address (still pretty cheap) and (ii) older pages with http image tags get the "partially secure" yellow warning flag in browsers.

To elaborate somewhat on (ii) -- according to the predominant, ultra-picky browsers, my posts with images prior to July 2014 don't rate the little green "secure lock" icon. The posts themselves are encrypted but because I used "http" in the text of the post at the time I uploaded the images, dumb browsers treat this as insecure, even though my host redirects all the http image requests to https before they reach the browser!

If I had better command line skills I would edit my MYSQL tables to convert all instances of "https://www.tommoody.us/images/..." in the text of posts to "https://www.tommoody.us/images/..." But I don't.

The Ars article mentions a change-in-the-works to the prevailing web protocol (W3C) that might solve this problem:

To prove that Barnes actually does care about URLs, he's the co-editor of a W3C specification that aims to preserve all those old links and upgrade them to HTTPS. The spec is known as HSTS priming, and it works with another proposed standard known as Upgrade Insecure Requests to offer the Web a kind of upgrade path around the link rot Berners-Lee fears.

With Upgrade Insecure Requests, site authors could tell a browser that they intend all resources to be loaded over HTTPS even if the link is HTTP. This solves the legacy content problem, particularly in cases where the content can't be updated (like, for example, The New York Times' archived sites).

Both of these proposals are still very early drafts, but they would, if implemented, provide a way around one of the biggest problems with HTTPS. At least, they'd prevent broken links some of the time. Totally abandoned content will never be upgraded to HTTPS, neither will content where the authors, like Winer, elect not to upgrade. This isn't a huge problem, though, because browsers will still happily load the insecure content (for now at least). [emphasis added by TM]

Probably by the time this W3C spec gets adopted Google will have forced us bloggers who aren't part of the Google Plus/Zuckerberg Hoodieverse to change our sites to something else entirely (moan).

Update: An emailer amends my statement "my host redirects all the http image requests to https before they reach the browser" to note that "your server sends a 302 redirect to the browser, telling it to make another request for the HTTPS url; the browser performs two requests." The point is the image is encrypted by the time it reaches the browser and the "yellow flag" designation is unfair.

The same emailer also suggests that I google "mysql change http urls to https" and thinks that leads to a non-command-line solution. Well, yes, that's the first thing I did, and Word Press recommends using phpMyAdmin to edit the MYSQL database. That requires what I called "command line skills" and I'm not comfortable with their suggestion, since every site has its own little nuances. I'd rather lobby for browser makers to be less aggressive about tainting sites with yellow flags.

Update 2: Thanks to mb for fixing this using phpMyAdmin -- those piss-yellow triangles no longer show up for my innocent, older posts.

The hot new concept among academic new media mavens is "the blockchain." Rhizome.org is pushing this heavily, as they did earlier with Facebook, as a technology the radical left should be comfortable with. See, for example, this article linked from their (browser-crashing) front page.
The article makes a strange, slightly incoherent case for why Bitcoin, a utopian technology of the libertarian right, should appeal to artists.

Bitcoins are "mined" by performing cryptographic calculations, so an underground industry of server-farm-resembling stacks, thousands of them, sucking hydrocarbon power, have sprung up in what Tolkien might have called "the dark places of the Earth." The article is accompanied by intrepid documentary video footage of a shady third world bitcoin mine (these clips have everything but a VHS tape of "Simple Jack" playing in the background). The article explains this quasi-criminal enterprise:

These industrial mines are a visceral reminder that the work of Bitcoin, despite its being an abstract, invisible tender, is physical. They are also a reminder that this is a global competition organized around fairly amoral principles in an unregulated field. May the most ingenious and ruthlessly efficient win. Individual enthusiasts mining on their home computers have given way to entrepreneurial miners, brute-force extracting the bitcoin pool, capped at 21 million.

Which sounds awful. And yet, the article explains, the same Silicon Valley forces that brought you liking and poking are also interested in it: "Risk-takers from Peter Thiel to Mark Andreesen to the Winklevoss twins are betting that Bitcoin can and will become the basis for future exchange."

What possible creative uses can be made of this borderline-criminal-meets-Winklevoss technology? Turns out, the article isn't talking about art, it's mainly interested in e-commerce. For visual art, several examples are mentioned, couched in the language of finest vaporware:

A few evolving architectures, built atop the blockchain, seem poised to serve artists. Organizations like Ascribe, Mine, Monegraph and Ethereum all believe solutions to the license management problem lie along the blockchain. Mine is an application using the blockchain’s digital signature protocol as proof of ownership, linking the meta-data fingerprint of a digital work with its creator. Another contender is Monegraph, first presented at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven Conference: a tool for digital creators to produce a license for their work’s use. Currently, a creator can upload their .PNG, .JPG or GIF, set a license contract that binds the buyer and owner, and claim a username to publish to one’s personal public catalog, all along the blockchain. The system takes management of blockchain transactions out of the equation, with the ultimate goal of creating a thriving digital art-marketplace. Ascribe goes a step further, helping digital artists use a cryptographic ledger (the bitcoin blockchain) to register original work, verify provenance, and securely transfer of ownership of works to galleries.[emphasis added]

And finally, music. Again, we're not talking about "blockchain techno," this is more like some kind of Napster for crypto-heads:

Peertracks is one front-end (a centralized gateway) for this blockchain. It is a space where fans can store their artistcoins and where artists can crowdfund. Fans can get better prices on merchandise depending on how many artistcoins they have. It gathers peer-to-peer recommendations and playlists.

Am guessing art and music will continue to be made, consumed, and even sold without yet another technologically-overdetermined system being put in place. We're all looking for something we can live with, post-Snowden, but this probably isn't it.