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 in VSCode versus Vim. I’m working on a python file (sql.py) which is reading some...

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 that they should use TLS and should validate TLS certificates when sending...

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 project resources. There may be short periods of downtime during the transition,...

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 secure While email is vulnerable, hop-to-hop connections between servers are...

The internal TLD ICANN recently reserved .internal for private use, sanctioning the use of the TLD for ad-hoc purposes. The decision solidifies .internal for this role, which it has long supported, albeit on unofficial capacity. The reservation was important as previous use was not sanctioned and was on shaky...

td, th { padding: 0.6em; border: 1px dashed #ccc; text-align: center; } In this post, I audit several prominent mail providers to discover how they handle email encryption and show how MTA-STS can help improve email security. Background When SMTP was created it was cleartext only, as we hadn’t yet figured out...

Challenges of free domain registration Since 2012, Freenom acted as the domain name registrar for several free top level domains including .cf, .ga, .gq, .ml, and .tk. Unfortunately, at the start of 2023, it was pretty clear that Freenom was not doing well. Freenom was sued by Meta for ignoring abuse complaints and...

I wrote my first blog post 10 years ago using Jekyll as a framework. I didn’t love the process. It took quite a bit of work to get something I liked. I felt like I was promised a quick-and-easy solution but found that I was sinking an unexpected amount of time into tweaking things. Plain HTML blogging I recently...

I’ve been building a directory of RSS feeds which has quickly grown to over a thousand feeds. To build the directory, I wrote a web crawler (open source) which fetches each feed, parses it to collect metadata, identifies OPML blogrolls, and spiders to each new feed it discovers. I’m hopeful the directory will expand...

img { max-width:15em; padding: 1em; } RSS and other web feeds are a great way to keep track of articles published by your favorite blogs. But feed discovery remains challenging. Some recent work in this space opens up new opportunities. History Since the earliest blogs were published, blogrolls helped readers...

I’ve been thinking a lot about the type of software I want to build and use. I spend so much of my screen time using large feature-heavy software, which are one-size-fits-none at best or outright hostile. I’m left frustrated, distracted, and wanting something better. I write lots of mini software projects as a...

div.indent { padding-left: 3em; } The certificate authority (CA) system does an incredible job of solving an impossible challenge. Think about it. The CAs measure control of a domain name and then issue TLS certificates that pair cryptographic keys to those names. They do this on a global scale, often automatically....