Robert Alexander's Tech Blog
Robert Alexander's Tech Blog
Robert Alexander
A personal blog featuring nuanced deep dives into tech, security, and the cloud.
Latest Posts
In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the official U.S. time reference. NIST distributes this reference to enable all sorts of applications from meteorology to GPS satellites....
Computer clock synchronization is a complicated process, requiring protocols like NTP and a specialized server to answer requests. In this post I explore a “serverless” method, which relies on widely available CDNs to distribute time....
figure { padding-left: 3em; } blockquote { border-left: 0.2em solid grey; padding: 0.2em 1em 0.2em; margin: 2em; } I’ve recently started building a WordPress plugin, which is my first WordPress and PHP-based project. I’ve programmed in a...
figure { padding-left: 3em; } Many software developers feel we are at a source control inflection point. GitHub has reigned for over fifteen years, and we may be in the early days of an exodus. Developers have become increasingly...
blockquote { border-left: 0.2em solid #77d; padding: 0.2em 0.8em; margin: 3em; } This blog post explores FeedLand.com, an RSS feed reader with unique social elements. The goal of FeedLand is to make news a social thing, following the...
blockquote { font-style: italic; } Time is one of those things that is significantly harder to deal with than you’d naively expect. Its common in computing to assume that computers know the current time. After all, there are protocols...
When social media first entered my life, it came with a promise of connection. Facebook connected college-aged adults in a way that was previously impossible, helping to shape our digital generation. Social media was our super-power and...
This post is part of a collection on UUIDs. Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) are handy tool for a distributed systems architect. The provide a method by which a distributed system can generate IDs without meaningful risk of...
I’ve been getting back into blogging and am happy to share that my next group of blog posts will be a collection. When I write I often end up with a massive amount of content. I have a hard time keeping posts focused on a single theme;...
This post is part of a collection on UUIDs. What is IDOR? Indirect Object Reference (IDOR) occurs when a resource can be accessed directly by its ID even when the user does not have proper authorization to access it. IDOR is a common...
thead td { font-weight: bold; } th, td { padding: 0.5em; } table { text-align: left; padding-bottom: 3em; } td:nth-child(1) { text-align: right; } I downloaded the Tranco list of top domain names and ran DNS MX lookups to detect mail...
You’ve probably noticed that VSCode is very popular among programmers. As I drop into a Vim session, yet again, I wonder if I’m missing something. What keeps me coming back to Vim? Visual comparison Here’s the roughly same view as seen...
td, th { padding: 0.6em; border: 1px dashed #ccc; text-align: center; } SMTP MTA Strict Transport Security (MTA-STS) is a mechanism for securing email as it travels between mail servers. Similarly to DANE, MTA-STS signals to the sender...
Update: In exciting news, the getlocalcert.net project will continue under new management. I’m grateful to William Harrison for taking the lead on future development. Over the next month, I’ll be transferring domains, servers, and other...
td, th { padding: 0.6em; border: 1px dashed #ccc; text-align: center; } When I’ve talked to developers about the confidentiality of email in transit, between mail servers, I usually hear one of these responses: Everyone knows email isn’t...