Tag: HTTP

Google and HTTPS

Here are some interesting news on the subject of Google and HTTPS:

In support of our work to implement HTTPS across all of our products (https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/) we have been operating our own subordinate Certificate Authority (GIAG2), issued by a third-party. This has been a key element enabling us to more rapidly handle the SSL/TLS certificate needs of Google products.

As we look forward to the evolution of both the web and our own products it is clear HTTPS will continue to be a foundational technology. This is why we have made the decision to expand our current Certificate Authority efforts to include the operation of our own Root Certificate Authority. To this end, we have established Google Trust Services (https://pki.goog/), the entity we will rely on to operate these Certificate Authorities on behalf of Google and Alphabet.

The process of embedding Root Certificates into products and waiting for the associated versions of those products to be broadly deployed can take time. For this reason we have also purchased two existing Root Certificate Authorities, GlobalSign R2 and R4. These Root Certificates will enable us to begin independent certificate issuance sooner rather than later.

We intend to continue the operation of our existing GIAG2 subordinate Certificate Authority.

If you need a bit of help putting this into perspective, this Hacker News thread has your back:

You can now have a website secured by a certificate issued by a Google CA, hosted on Google web infrastructure, with a domain registered using Google Domains, resolved using Google Public DNS, going over Google Fiber, in Google Chrome on a Google Chromebook. Google has officially vertically integrated the Internet.

The History of the URL

The History of the URL is a brilliant compilation of ideas and resources, explaining how we got to the URLs we use and love (or hate) today.  In fact, the article comes in two parts:

  1. Domain, protocol, and port
  2. Path, fragment, query, and auth

Read them in whatever order you prefer. But I guarantee that you’ll have a number of different responses through out, from “Wow! I never knew that” and “I would have never thought of that!” to “No way! I don’t believe it“.

And here is one of the bits that made me smile:

In 1996 Keith Shafer, and several others proposed a solution to the problem of broken URLs. The link to this solution is now broken. Roy Fielding posted an implementation suggestion in July of 1995. The link is now broken.

tus.io – open protocol for resumable file uploads

tus.io, in their own words:

People share more and more photos and videos every day. Mobile networks remain fragile however. Platform APIs are a mess and every project builds its own file uploader. There are a thousand one week projects that barely work, when all we need is one real project. One project done right.

We are going to do this right. We aim to solve the problem of unreliable file uploads once and for all. tus is a new open protocol for resumable uploads built on HTTP. It offers simple, cheap and reusable stacks for clients and servers. It supports any language, any platform and any network.

HTTP Status Dogs

HTTP Status Dogs – Hypertext Transfer Protocol response status codes. And dogs.  If you are even a tiny bit familiar with HTTP or dogs, this will put a smile on your face.  I’m thinking to use these as default error pages from now on.

502