Finally Let’s Encrypt went public with their open source, easy to use, SSL certification solution (Available for everybody, starting on the 3rd of December).
And yes, it’s free! As I’m writing this, Let’s Encrypt is still beta status, but working well in a productive environment. Check out their site to understand how it works.

One of the challenges faced most often by those of us in the field of usability is finding good data about user behavior quickly, accurately, and, in most cases, cheaply. In an environment where many stakeholders question the return on investment in usability, some in the industry have developed interesting ideas aimed at gathering user data. One such idea is the analysis of server log files to gather information about user behavior. On the surface, it is easy to understand the gravitation towards server logs: They’re supposedly a data source which portrays what people are doing on a site. Server logs supposedly show what people click on, which pages they view, and how they get from page to page.

Often when I talk to clients, I am asked the following question: “Can we track how many users with disabilities access our site?”. The question itself is always asked with good intentions. The client wants to be able to provide an improved experience for persons with disabilities.

The short answer is that you can’t. At the time of writing there isn’t a way to reliably detect whether someone visiting your site is using a screen reader (or screen magnifier). You might have heard that Flash will do the trick, but that might not be quite the solution you’re expecting.

On February 26, 2014, the webAIM project published the results of their 5th screen reader user survey. Two questions were new in this survey that pertain to a recently growing desire of some web developers to know whether they’re dealing with assistive technologies on the other end or not. The results were rather shocking to me as a representative of a browser vendor and experienced assistive technology user:

We have an advanced webpage (ASP.NET, C#), and a application which needs to be installed on the client computer in order to utilize the webpage to its fullest. The application is a tray app, and has primarily two tasks. Detect when certain events happen on the webserver (for instance invited to a meeting, or notify of an upcoming meeting). The other task the trayapp has is to use a custom protocol (trayapp://) to perform some ajax calls back to the server.

After several years of trial and error, I finally have a complete RAW photography workflow in Linux that I am happy with.

The applications in this workflow aren’t just native to Linux, they are also free, open source software (FOSS). There is no need to dual boot, use WINE or a virtual machine. It’s a pure FOSS photography workflow running in Linux.

We've been discussing some of Jelly Bean's new security features, but this post will take a few steps back and focus on an older one that has been available since Honeycomb (3.0), announced in the beginning of the now distant 2011: disk encryption. We'll glance over the implementation, discuss how passwords are managed and introduce a simple tool that lets you change the password from the comfort of Android's UI.

TextBelt is an outgoing SMS API that uses carrier-specific gateways to deliver your text messages for free, and without ads. The service is fairly reliable and has sent over 100,000 texts.

During Jacob Applebaum's talk at DebConf15, he noted that Debian should TLS-enable all services, especially the mirrors.

His reasoning was that when a high-value target downloads a security update for package foo, an adversary knows that they are still using a vulnerable version of foo and try to attack before the security update has been installed.

In this specific case, TLS is not of much use though. If the target downloads 4.7 MiB right after a security update with 4.7 MiB has been released, or downloads from security.debian.org, it's still obvious what's happening. Even padding won't help much as the 5 MiB download will also be suspicious. The mere act of downloading anything from the mirrors after an update has been released is reason enough to try an attack.

The solution, is, of course, Tor.

Lantronix Spider provides secure KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) server management over an IP network. Unlike any other product on the market, Spider offers a flexible, scalable and affordable CAT5-based remote access KVM solution in a cable friendly, compact “zero-footprint” package.

The IP8000 is a PCI card implementation of a control unit that provides "over-IP" access and control of the server it is installed in. The IP8000 allows multi-platform access and control of the server from remote locations using a standard Internet browser or with stand-alone Windows and Java applications