HTTPS certificates with StartSSL, a guide by konklone

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I have no idea where Eric Mill got his pseudnym of konklone from but this is a great article he's written about using StartSSL certificates to secure your website.

The great thing about StartSSL is that their certificates are free. My previous SSL certificates I've used have cost money, albeit only in the region of about £10/year. Free is still free.

As far as I can tell StartSSL will let you have as many free (domain/email validated) certificates. I have two registered so far.

I can highly recomend StartSSL to anyone thinking of getting an SSL certificate.

One Second on the Internet

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It just baffles my mind on how sites like Facebook and Google deal with that much data. Its truly astonishing.

Oh Noes, iPad Sales Struggling!

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Not really, Apple still sold 14.6 million iPads! That’s a lot of iPads. Apple also sold a record Q2 high of 31.2 million iPhones.

There is still the issue of Samsung’s supposed dominance of the market. They sell a much wider variety of products than Apple. Of course thry’ll ultimately sell more devices.

IndieWeb and Short URLs

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Here I shall use the terms URI and URL interchangeably to mean the same thing. I appreciate there are subtle differences.

The IndieWeb is a fantastic idea. The web itself is inherently open. No one owns it, no one directly controls it. However, if you aren’t careful what services you use on the web then it can effectively end up that way. We all use the web in a primarily social way these days, social networks if you will. The big three players on the social web are Facebook, Twitter, and Google with their Google+ service. They want you to spend as much of your time as possible on their services in order to maximise their advertising revenues.

This doesn’t play nicely with the inherently open and interoperable foundations of the web. Foundations without which these big players wouldn’t exist.

And thus the IndieWeb is born. A desire to own your social identity and share however little or much of that social presence with these big players you want. Which I think is absolutely right.

But what of URL shortening services?

Some people seem to think that having your very own short URL helps in this cause. Which I suppose it does, but I think only to a small degree. Why do we even need to shorten web addresses? The only situation I think it would be necessary is posting/syndicating to Twitter. Any other service has ample character space to post the full URL, or is sensible and uses annotations. On Twitter however, any link, regardless of how short it is, gets wrapped up in their t.co service.

I therefore don’t currently see any compelling reason to run your own URL shortening service other than simply because you can.

*[URL]: Universal Resource Link *[URI]: Universal Resouce Identifier

The “Failed” State

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A thorough examination of yet another way that the U.S. attempts to justify its foreign policy. Namely by claiming a sovereign state is failing and needs saving.

Luckily, we can pinpoint exactly where it all began – right down to the words on the page. The failed state was invented in late 1992 by Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, two US state department employees, in an article in – you guessed it – Foreign Policy, suggestively entitled Saving failed states. With the end of the cold war, they argued, “a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation state, utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community”. And with that, the beast was born.