A lot has changed in the Microsoft technology world in the last 7 years since I launched ASafaWeb in September 2011. Windows XP is no longer the dominant operating system (Win 7 actually caught up the month I launched ASafaWeb). Internet Explorer is no longer the dominant browser (Chrome was in 3rd place back then). Windows Server has gone from 2008 R2 to 2012 to 2012 R2 to 2016 to 2019. And lastly, .NET has gone through a heap of different versions (as has Visual Studio) from 4.x to Core 1 and now Core 2 (and minor versions within them).My own personal focus has also changed moving from corporate life to independence. From development and architecture to security....

These days, I get a lot of messages from people on security related things. Often it's related to data breaches or sloppy behaviour on behalf of some online service playing fast and loose with HTTPS or passwords or some other easily observable security posture. But on a fairly regular basis, I get an email from someone which effectively boils down to this:Hey, have you seen [insert thing here]? It's totally going to kill passwords!No, it's not and to save myself from repeating the same message over and over again, I want to articulate precisely why passwords have a lot of life left in them yet. But firstly, let me provide a high-level overview of the sort of product...

On my first attempt at recording this, I decided the framing was crooked after a couple of minutes so I started again. On my second attempt, the PC BSOD'd after 42 mins and I thought I'd lost all the audio. I hadn't, so on the third attempt I completed the last of it. Then I waited nearly an hour for it to render before realising there was unedited material at the beginning so I had to re-render the whole thing again. This is on top of one of my screens refusing to go beyond 480p today and a week filled with various other frustrating tech support issues.But despite that, I persevered and got through much more content than I...

I'm home! And home for another 6 weeks at that which is rather exciting if I'm honest. Travel really takes its toll in so many ways and I'm really looking forward to just having a bunch of time to code, blog and jet ski (not necessarily ordered by priority).But even without having had time to blog, there's a heap of material this week including the SIBOS conference, HIBP (apparently) being a top site that's "shaped the web", people losing their minds over sex toy privacy and EV certificates, Wife Lovers being breaches and some really interesting outcomes in people's effort to hold Apollo accountable under GDPR after their breach. On that last point, do listen to how this is...

Last one before home time! But it has been an epic trip and as I say in the video, this is by far my most enjoyable trip to the US yet after probably a dozen over the last few years (that includes Hawaii, too). Given the interest after my pointing out a couple of little differences in the US compared to the rest of the world last week, after the usual tech and infosec intro this week I decided to focus a big whack of this week's video on what some of differences look like.Other than that, there's the usual things including new tech (the Apple Watch), data breaches (Facepunch and another especially nasty one), sextortion scams and fabricated...

I'm in Texas! And I've had enough BBQ to last me a very long time. I'm here doing a couple of speaking events and other related things as well as taking some time out with my wife to see the sites. As such, it's a bit quieter this week but there's still a couple of things I reckon are worthy of discussion.Just before jumping on the plane over here I pushed out a blog post on how my approach to callbacks in HIBP broke Mozilla's service which in turn broke my Azure Function. This was one of those cases where sure, I didn't want anything to break, but it was a good learning experience that helped me make a...

For the most part, Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) runs very smoothly, especially given how cheaply I run many parts of the service for. Occasionally though, I screw up and get something wrong that interrupts the otherwise slick operation and results in some outage. Last weekend was one such occasion and I want to explain what I got wrong, how you might get it wrong too and then, of course, how to fix it.But first, some background: A few months ago I announced that Mozilla and AgileBits were baking HIBP into Firefox and 1Password (I'll call them "subscribers" in this post). They're leveraging the anonymity model described there to ensure their users can search for their identities without me...

It's another "business as usual" week; past events, upcoming events, major security news, someone forgetting to renew a certificate and a new Pluralsight course. Actually, thinking about it more, this is possibly the most normal week I can remember, which is kinda disconcerting considering the (potential) impact of some of that news.Next week I'll be back in the US and in Texas so the schedule may be a little erratic, but I'll do what I can to pump out another update on time and with more of the usual craziness this industry is full of. ##ReferencesOne of the kids blogs I referred to was Eve Cogan's (this is a great example of a kid carving out a great social...

I take more pleasure than I probably should in watching the bewilderment within organisations as the technology landscape rapidly changes and rushes ahead of them. Perhaps "pleasure" isn't the right word, is it more "amusement"? Or even "curiosity"? Whichever it is, I find myself rhetorically asking "so you just expected everything to stay the same forever, did you?"A case in point: you should look for the green padlock on a website so that you know it's safe. Except that you can't say that anymore because so many phishing sites are using HTTPS (remember, encryption is morally neutral) which is why Barclays Bank had their ad pulled earlier this year. You also can't say "green padlock" anymore because after Chrome...

Home again! Another NDC is down and I talk a little about how the talks were rated and about PubConf (make sure you get to one of these one day!) I've got another couple of weeks at home before any more travel and I'll talk more about the next things as they draw closer. This week, I'm on my new iPhone (which is very similar to my old iPhone), I'm talking about Uber getting fined, Cloudflare introducing some very cool new things, Firefox Monitor launching on top of the HIBP APIs and my newfound love for the Pi-hole. Seriously, this is a very cool bit of tech and a fun project to build for home. I'll share more over time...