Some software is too reliable

So my email client has been giving me warnings for a few weeks about my mail server’s certificate having expired. I trust the server, so I assumed something had gone wrong with certbot and the renewal process hadn’t worked. I put fixing it on my todo list. Today I finally got a chance to look … Continued

Social Spam

I've recently started receiving the occasional piece of junk mail from friends and colleages who have e-mail accounts at some of the larger webmail services (Hotmail, GMail, etc). The messages genuinely seem to come from their accounts, with proper message headers indicating that they were really sent via the webmail service, and sent to everyone … Continued

Privacy

Els despairs about some high-profile privacy and data protection gaffs in 2007 and asks can we still get some privacy in 2008?. Her use of the word “get” rather than “retain” is very telling — it’s not just a matter of retaining our current level of privacy, but of trying to claw back what we’ve … Continued

It’ll be in the Last Place You Look

Oops! The HMG (trading as Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) has misplaced the personal data of about 40% of the UK’s population, including 15 million children. There is “no evidence that it has fallen into the wrong hands”, but there is no evidence that it has not. This is the same government that plans for … Continued

How PHP programmers get things wrong

Firstly, three disclaimers: PHP is a great programming language, one of my favourites — this website is written in PHP; there are many great PHP programmers out there, some of whom probably never get things wrong; I probably get things wrong a lot of the time. The majority of the database-backed Open Source PHP projects … Continued