After the famous Facebook outage a few days ago, Facebook Engineering made a – to be fair, reasonably detailed – statement on what went wrong and how it affected the service. One particular comment attached to it drew my attention: “It’s great to hear and see that big companies like Facebook are so open with…
Category: Tech
Taking good care of your keyring
Recently I was surprised to find that many of the rules I took for granted when dealing with an OpenPGP keyring, and the other activities associated with a web of trust, were new to some people I spoke to. These rules are born from a mixture of experience, accepted good practice, and wider reading, with…
Translation fail
I got this in my Debian mailbox the other day (it’s an invitation to Facebook, in French): Bonjour Jonathan, Je vous ai invite rejoindre Facebook recemment et je voulais vous rappeler que de que vous serez enregistre, vous pourrez vous connecter […] and so on, right down to the end where there is this gem:…
Improving the resilience of the Web of Trust
(this is a post in two parts) At the BoF of GPG Key Management: Best Practices, dkg had two immediate recommendations for improving WoT resilience: Regularly refresh your local keyring from the key servers; If you have spare space and transit, provide a key server to take part in the pool. Regular Refreshes This is…
Batch importing caff signatures
Having swapped details with many, many people at Debconf, and then been away for a week after that, I found myself with an overflowing mailbox and a long task of “open mail, provide pass-phrase, pipe to gpg –import“. I wanted a way to batch-import all these signatures (there are three times as many, because my…