Think back to the web of fifteen years ago. Most of the web sites of the time consisted of a few pages of content along with a contact page (and maybe even a guestbook.) Most often that contact page was backed by a script that mailed the results to a fixed e-mail...
Backups Backups are important. Everyone knows this. Few do anything about it, most likely because it seems like one more thing (like getting life insurance, a will, a retirement plan, etc.) It also doesn’t have immediate consequences. However, if you need a backup,...
Mozilla Persona is decentralized sign-in protocol. (Actually, the protocol is named BrowserID, but Mozilla rebranded their implementation to confuse everyone. It worked.) It uses e-mail-like identifiers and public-key authentication to validate identity assertions....
I’m going to tell you a little story about a bug. Like most bugs, it started with an invalid assumption. You see, I was ambushed by permissions on a network file system. Here’s what my code looked like, at least in spirit: import os import os.path # Build a path...
How does a one-time password work? Photo by EdwinMSarmiento If you read a previous article I wrote, you’ll remember that I mentioned the use of multi-factor authentication. One common tool for implementing the something you have factor is the one-time password. When...