Links

Celebrating Ten Years of Encrypting the Web with Let’s Encrypt

eff.org

The most important measure of Let’s Encrypt’s and Certbot’s successes is how much of people’s daily web browsing uses HTTPS. According to Firefox data, 78% of pages loaded use HTTPS. That’s tremendously improved from 27% in 2013 when Let’s Encrypt was founded. There’s still a lot of work to be done to get to 100%.

Nice to actually reflect on this statistic and realize how much progress has been made towards web privacy.

What Pipes is

pipes.digital

Pipes is a spiritual successor to Yahoo! Pipes, but if you did not know that site, you can think of Pipes as a visual programing editor specialized on feeds, or a visual shell, or simply as a glorified feed configurator.

The Dying Computer Museum

ascii.textfiles.com

And for all I’d know, it was a museum. There’s no laws on what a thing can call itself regarding being a museum, exhibition, tour, or display. It’s against the law to take money to attend the museum and you get led to an empty lot, sure. But if something has the vestements and affectation of a museum, and you see the big sign saying Museum out front and you go in and there’s displays and staff and events and meetings, you would certainly think it was a museum.

Turns out it wasn’t.

Brent Simmons on computer freedom

inessential.com

Maybe because I lived through this — maybe because I’m a certain age — I believe that that freedom to use my computer exactly how I want to, to make it do any crazy thing I can think of — is the thing about computers.

[…]

Macs carry the flame for the revolution. They’re the computers we own, right? They’re the astounding, powerful machines that we get to master.

Except that lately, it feels more and more like we’re just renting Macs too, and they’re really Apple’s machines, not ours.

With every tightened screw we have less power than we had. And doing the things — unsanctioned, unplanned-for, often unwieldy and even unwise — that computers are so wonderful for becomes ever-harder.

Administrator explains how Oregon DMV accidentally registered people to vote

opb.org

We’ve made significant changes to the user interface that our staff sees when they are choosing those documents. So we’ve changed the dropdown menu to make it more difficult to choose a U.S. passport or a U.S. birth certificate. In that system, we are requiring that staff enter the state and county of birth for a birth certificate document in the U.S. and made some other changes like that. In addition to the system changes, we’ve now done intensive training with staff about the mechanics of the entry and also the importance of getting this right every single time. There have been multiple trainings already — and that training is ongoing and will continue to be ongoing into the future.

There’s never enough money and time for good design until there has to be.