a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros
In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.
Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.
In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.
I like that second kind of bookmarklet.
Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.
Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.
Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.
A very astute framing by Ted Chiang—large language models as a form of lossy compression for text.
When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
A lot of uses have been proposed for large language models. Thinking about them as blurry JPEGs offers a way to evaluate what they might or might not be well suited for.
Back in March, I wrote about a dilemma I was facing. I could make the certificates on The Session more secure. But if I did that, people using older Android and iOS devices could no longer access the site:
As a site owner, I can either make security my top priority, which means you’ll no longer be able to access my site. Or I can provide you access, which makes my site less secure for everyone.
In the end, I decided in favour of access. But now this issue has risen from the dead. And this time, it doesn’t matter what I think.
Most notably, this includes versions of Android prior to 7.1.1. That means those older versions of Android will no longer trust certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.
This makes me sad. It’s another instance of people being forced to buy new devices. Last time ‘round, my dilemma was choosing between security and access. This time, access isn’t an option. It’s a choice between security and the environment (assuming that people are even in a position to get new devices—not an assumption I’m willing to make).
But this time it’s out of my hands. Let’s Encrypt certificates will stop working on older devices and a whole lotta websites are suddenly going to be inaccessible.
I could look at using a different certificate authority, one I’d have to pay for. It feels a bit galling to have to go back to the scammy world of paying for security—something that Let’s Encrypt has taught us should quite rightly be free. But accessing a website should also be free. It shouldn’t come with the price tag of getting a new device.
Universal access is at the heart of the World Wide Web. It’s also something I value when I’m building anything on the web. Whatever I’m building, I want you to be able to visit using whatever browser or device that you choose.
Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have the same experience in an old browser as you are in the latest version of Firefox or Chrome. Far from it. Not only is that not feasible, I don’t believe it’s desirable either. But if you’re using an old browser, while you might not get to enjoy the newest CSS or JavaScript, you should still be able to access a website.
Applying the principle of progressive enhancement makes this emminently doable. As long as I build in a layered way, everyone gets access to the barebones HTML, even if they can’t experience newer features. Crucially, as long as I’m doing some feature detection, those newer features don’t harm older browsers.
But there’s one area where maintaining backward compatibility might well have an adverse effect on modern browsers: security.
I don’t just mean whether or not you’re serving sites over HTTPS. Even if you’re using TLS—Transport Layer Security—not all security is created equal.
Modern. Services with clients that support TLS 1.3 and don’t need backward compatibility.
Intermediate. General-purpose servers with a variety of clients, recommended for almost all systems.
Old. Compatible with a number of very old clients, and should be used only as a last resort.
Because I value universal access, I should really go for the “old” setting. That ensures my site is accessible all the way back to Android 2.3 and Safari 1. But if I do that, I will be supporting TLS 1.0. That’s not good. My site is potentially vulnerable.
Alright then, I’ll go for “intermediate”—that’s the recommended level anyway. Now I’m no longer providing TLS 1.0 support. But that means some older browsers can no longer access my site.
This is exactly the situation I found myself in with The Session. I had a score of A+ from SSL Labs. I was feeling downright smug. Then I got emails from actual users. One had picked up an old Samsung tablet second hand. Another was using an older version of Safari. Neither could access the site.
Sure enough, if you cut off TLS 1.0, you cut off Safari below version six.
Alright, then. Can’t they just upgrade? Well …no. Apple has tied Safari to OS X. If you can’t upgrade your operating system, you can’t upgrade your browser. So if you’re using OS X Mountain Lion, you’re stuck with an insecure version of Safari.
Fortunately, you can use a different browser. It’s possible to install, say, Firefox 37 which supports TLS 1.2.
On desktop, that is. If you’re using an older iPhone or iPad and you can’t upgrade to a recent version of iOS, you’re screwed.
This isn’t an edge case. This is exactly the kind of usage that iPads excel at: you got the device a few years back just to do some web browsing and not much else. It still seems to work fine, and you have no incentive to buy a brand new iPad. And nor should you have to.
In that situation, you’re stuck using an insecure browser.
As a site owner, I can either make security my top priority, which means you’ll no longer be able to access my site. Or I can provide you access, which makes my site less secure for everyone. (That’s what I’ve done on The Session and now my score is capped at B.)
What I can’t do is tell you to install a different browser, because you literally can’t. Sure, technically you can install something called Firefox from the App Store, or you can install something called Chrome. But neither have anything to do with their desktop counterparts. They’re differently skinned versions of Safari.
Apple refuses to allow browsers with any other rendering engine to be installed. Their reasoning?
If we want a 100% encrypted web then we need to encrypt all sites, despite whether or not you agree with what they do/say/sell/etc… 100% is 100% and it includes the ‘bad guys’ too.
How a certificate with extended validation makes it easier to phish. But I think the title could be amended—here’s what’s really broken:
On Safari, the URL is completely hidden! This means the attacker does not even need to register a convincing phishing domain. They can register anything, and Safari will happily cover it with a nice green bar.
This graph warms the cockles of my heart. It’s so nice to see a genuinely good project like Let’s Encrypt come in and upset the applecart of a sluggish monopolistic industry.
I’ve been having a few issues with my certificate renewals with Certbot (the artist formerly known as Let’s Encrypt). If I did a dry-run for renewing my certificates…
/etc/certbot-auto renew --dry-run
… I kept getting this message:
Encountered vhost ambiguity but unable to ask for user guidance in non-interactive mode. Currently Certbot needs each vhost to be in its own conf file, and may need vhosts to be explicitly labelled with ServerName or ServerAlias directories. Falling back to default vhost *:443…
It turns out that Certbot doesn’t like HTTP and HTTPS configurations being lumped into one .conf file. Instead it expects to see all the port 80 stuff in a domain.com.conf file, and the port 443 stuff in a domain.com-ssl.conf file.
This is a really great short explanation by Chris. I think it shows that the really power of JavaScript in the browser isn’t so much the language itself, but the DOM—the glue that ties the JavaScript to the HTML.
It reminds me of the old jQuery philosophy: find something and do stuff to it.
They’re all hosted on the same (virtual) box as adactio.com—Ubuntu 14.04 running Apache 2.4.7 on Digital Ocean. If you’ve got a similar configuration, this might be useful for you.
First off, I’m using Let’s Encrypt. Except I’m not. It’s called Certbot now (I’m not entirely sure why).
I installed the Let’s Encertbot client with this incantation (which, like everything else here, will need root-level access so if none of these work, retry using sudo in front of the commands):
Seems like a good idea to put that certbot-auto thingy into a directory like /etc:
mv certbot-auto /etc
Rather than have Certbot generate conf files for me, I’m just going to have it generate the certificates. Here’s how I’d generate a certificate for yourdomain.com:
The first time you do this, it’ll need to fetch a bunch of dependencies and it’ll ask you for an email address for future reference (should anything ever go screwy). For subsequent domains, the process will be much quicker.
The result of this will be a bunch of generated certificates that live here:
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Make sure you update the /path/to/yourdomain.com part—you probably want a directory somewhere in /var/www or wherever your website’s files are sitting.
To exit the infernal text editor, hit ctrl and o, press enter in response to the prompt, and then hit ctrl and x.
If the yourdomain.com.conf didn’t previously exist, you’ll need to enable the configuration by running:
a2ensite yourdomain.com
Time to restart Apache. Fingers crossed…
service apache2 restart
If that worked, you should be able to go to https://yourdomain.com and see a lovely shiny padlock in the address bar.
Assuming that worked, everything is awesome! …for 90 days. After that, your certificates will expire and you’ll be left with a broken website.
Not to worry. You can update your certificates at any time. Test for yourself by doing a dry run:
** DRY RUN: simulating 'certbot renew' close to cert expiry
** (The test certificates below have not been saved.)
Congratulations, all renewals succeeded.
You could set yourself a calendar reminder to do the renewal (without the --dry-run bit) every few months. Or you could tell your server’s computer to do it by using a cron job. It’s not nearly as rude as it sounds.
You can fire up and edit your list of cron tasks with this command:
crontab -e
This tells the machine to run the renewal task at quarter past six every evening and log any results:
(Don’t worry: it won’t actually generate new certificates unless the current ones are getting close to expiration.) Leave the cronrab editor by doing the ctrl o, enter, ctrl x dance.
Hopefully, there’s nothing more for you to do. I say “hopefully” because I won’t know for sure myself for another 90 days, at which point I’ll find out whether anything’s on fire.
If you have other domains you want to secure, repeat the process by running:
You know, I probably should have said this at the start of this post, but I should clarify that any advice I’ve given here should be taken with a huge pinch of salt—I have little to no idea what I’m doing. I’m not responsible for any flame-bursting-into that may occur. It’s probably a good idea to back everything up before even starting to do this.
Yeah, I definitely should’ve mentioned that at the start.
Finally! An article about moving to HTTPS that isn’t simply saying “Hey, it’s easy and everyone should do it!” This case study says “Hey, it’s hard …and everyone should do it.”
