Soylent News Bungler Lets HTTPS Certificates Lapse

San Francisco CA

Description

Soylent News' self-appointed owner-operator tries to put the right spin on it: Late last night (~10 PM UTC), the security certificates for SoylentNews.org expired. (Out-of-date certs result in nasty warning messages being displayed by your browser.) Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience the outage caused. Unfortunately, that was after I (and others on staff who could do anything about it) had gone to bed. I had personally updated the certs in the past, but the last time was years ago. (TheMightyBuzzard had previously — and subsequently — handled getting and applying updated certs.) It had been so long that I could not find my notes on the process. (Note to self: it helps to look in the correct directory tree!) Thankfully, audioguy appeared and was able to get things updated. Please join me in thanking him for getting things straightened out! P.S. The current certs are due to expire December 14, 2021, Please feel free to remind us as that date approaches! P.P.S. The technical staff is aware of various automated solutions to renewals but made a conscious decision to do them manually. Remember that people make mistakes but to really foul things up use a computer! No, to really foul things up, it takes a pompous asshole - with too much money, and too much influence - to come and take things over, fire everyone who knows what's going on, replace them with your in-laws, and then blame the people you fired when things go bad. Garbage in, garbage out, morons. The whole idea of Soylent News was for it to be run by EVERYONE; not for the Jews to infiltrate, take it over, and, through stealth, acquire control of the site, to better control content and, eventually, monetarize the asset. Hence, the name: Soylent News was PEOPLE. Was. One other thing... You say this happened at 10 PM, London time (UTC is what us older operators call 'GMT'). 10 PM UTC is, like, 6 PM, East Coast time, and even earlier on the West Coast. The only possible way that 2200 UTC could possibly be too late to do anything, is if everyone controlling the site now lives in Israel. Which would explain a lot, wouldn't it? It would suggest that the takeover of Soylent News was a form of surreptitious premeditated aggression, by one nation-state's computer programmers, against another nation-state's population of computer programmers, in a premeditated attempt to interfere with freedom of speech of those computer programmers. An overt act of war, in other words. The other possibility is that this moron, Marty, doesn't even know what UTC stands for or how to use it. He just knows that important people append the letters 'UTC' after times, and he wants to appear important, too. Which is it? It could be both. If I were responsible for renewing certs, I would make a note on a calendar... or create an alarm, in my cellphone. Pretty obvious, huh? I wouldn't ask someone to remind me. Unless, of course, I was the sort of person who was more used to telling people what to do, than I was, used to assuming responsibility, and doing it, myself.