For reasons outside the scope of this entry, I'm looking for anOIDC or SAML identity provider that supports primary user andpassword authentication against our own data and then MFA authenticationthrough the university's SaaS vendor . As you'd expect,the university's MFA SaaS vendor supports all of the common MFAapproaches today, covering pushnotifications through phones, one time codes from hardware tokens,and some other stuff. However, pretty much all of the MFA integrationsI've been able to find only

How Go behaves if you have a zero value channel or map (a 'nil'channel or map) is somewhat confusing ( cf , via ). When we talk aboutit, it's worth remembering that this behavior is a somewhat arbitrarychoice on Go's part, not a fundamental set of requirements thatstems from, for example, other language semantics. Go has reasonsto have channels and maps behave as they do, but some those reasonshave to do with how channel and map values are implemented

Recently, I needed to delete about 1,200 email messages to aparticular destination from the mail queue on one of our systems.This turned out to be trivial, because this system was using Postfixand modern versions of Postfix can output mail queue status informationin JSON format. So I could dump the mail queue status, select therelevant messages and print the queue IDs with jq , and feed this to Postfix to delete themessages. This experience has left me with the definite view thateverything should have

Recently I was part of a conversation on the Fediverse that sparked anobvious in retrospect realization about computer security and howwe look at and talk about security measures. To put it succinctly, your institution cares about threats to it, not about threats toyou . It cares about threats to you only so far as they're threatsto it through you. Some of the security threats and sensible responsesto them overlap between you and your institution, but some of themdon't.

One of the areas where I

I recently read an article that, among other things, apparentlyseriously urging browser vendors to deprecate and disable plaintext HTTP connections by the end of October of this year ( via , and I'mdeliberately not linking directly to the article). While I am astrong fan of HTTPS in general, I have some feelings about a rapiddeprecation of HTTP .One of my views is that plain text HTTP is part of the web's longtail .

As I'm using the term here, the web

So I said something on the Fediverse :

Current status: it's all fun and games until the building's backbonerouter disappears.

A modest suggestion: obtain problem reporting/emergency contactnumbers for your upstream in advance and post them on the wallsomewhere. But you're on your own if you use VOIP desk phones.

(It's back now or I wouldn't be posting this, I'm in the officetoday. But it was an exciting 20 minutes.)

(I

Yesterday I wrote about how one problem with shared Unix hostingwas the lack of good support for resource limits in the Unixes ofthe time . But even once you havedecent resource limits, you still have an interlinked set of whatwe could call 'business' problems. These are the twin problems ofwhat resource limits you set on people and how you sell differentlevels of these resources limits to your customers.

(You may have the first problem even for purely internal resourceallocation on shared hosts within your organization, and

I recently read Comments on Shared Unix Hosting vs. the Cloud ( via ),which I will summarize as being sad about how old fashioned sharedhosting on a (shared) Unix system has basically died out, and alongwith it web server technology like CGI . As ithappens, I have a system administrator's view of why shared Unixhosting always had problems and was a down-market thing with variouslimitations, and why even today people aren't very happy withproviding it. In my view,

I've written before that keeping your site accessible to very oldbrowsers is non-trivial because of issueslike them not necessarily supporting modern TLS. However, there'sanother problem that people with older browsers are likely to befacing, unless circumstances on the modern web change. I saidon the Fediverse :

Today in unfortunate web browser developments: I think people usingolder versions of browsers, especially Chrome, are going to haveincreasing problems accessing websites. There are a lot of (bad)crawlers out there