DigiCert recently was forced to invalidate something like 50,000 of their DNS-challenge based certs because of a bug in their system, and they gave companies like mine only 24 hours to renew them before invalidating the old ones…
My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.
Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.
If we did a straight popular vote it would be no contest. Thank the electoral college for all the fuckery…
Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:
- A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
- Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
- Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
- Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
- Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
- If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.
That’s an optional software upgrade. It’ll cost you $12.95 a month.
Put them both in soundproof booths and only turn on their microphones when it’s their turn to actually respond to a question.
I’m shocked that the data center required retinal scans but that the employee with access could then just hold the door and let him and others in.
I used to work at a data center with lots of security. To get into the area with the servers you had to go through a man trap. It was a room a little larger than a telephone booth with automatic doors on both sides. To open the first door you needed a physical card key. Once inside the door closed, then to open the inner door you needed to both enter a PIN and have your hand scanned in a biometric scanner. Only after all that could you get inside. The booth also weighed you, and if your weight was off by a certain amount after your last pass through then it wouldn’t let you in. That was to prevent somebody from piggybacking with you.
Many years ago I had to try to debug a memory manager written by a really talented software engineer, with an interesting take on naming things…
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He referred to blocks of memory as “cookies”.
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He had a temporary variable named “handy” because it was handy to have around.
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He had a second temporary variable that referenced the first one that he called “son_of_handy”.
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If corruption was detected in a block of memory then it would set the flag “shit_cookie_corrupt”.
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If too many cookies were corrupt then the system would halt by calling the function “oh_shit_oh_shit_oh_shit”.
Reminds me of the movie The Final Countdown…