Daily 3-question quiz - Culture, Politics, History, and more

Welcome back to another watchTowr Labs blog. Brace yourselves, this is one of our most astounding discoveries.

Summary

What started out as a bit of fun between colleagues while avoiding the Vegas heat and $20 bottles of water in our Black Hat hotel rooms - has now seemingly become a

It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart. What’s a fixit, you ask? Once a quarter, my org with ~45 software engineers stops all regular work for a week. That means no roadmap work, no design work, no meetings or standups. Instead, we fix the small things that have been annoying us and our users:

an error message that’s been unclear for two years a weird glitch when the user scrolls and zooms at the same time a test which runs slower than it should, slowing down CI for everyone

The rules are simple: 1) no bug should take over 2 days and 2) all work should focus on either small end-user bugs/features or developer productivity.

For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it2. A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months3 on evenings, weekends, and vacation days, I finally released syntaqlite (GitHub), fulfilling this long-held wish. And I believe the main reason this happened was because of AI coding agents4. Of course, there’s no shortage of posts claiming that AI one-shot their project or pushing back and declaring that AI is all slop. I’m going to take a very different approach and, instead, systematically break down my experience building syntaqlite with AI, both where it helped and where it was detrimental. I’ll do this while contextualizing the project and my background so you can independently assess how generalizable this experience was. And whenever I make a claim, I’ll try to back it up with evidence from my project journal, coding transcripts, or commit history5.

Learn how packets flow inside and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Starting from the initial web request and down to the container hosting the application

Ever wanted to play the worlds second most popular videogame without actually playing it? Well, I will guide you through it! First of all, what do I mean by 'Pl

Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient.

On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. We were proud that we had issued a certificate that a significant majority of clients could accept, and had done it using automated software. Of course, in retrospect this was just the first of billions of certificates. Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’ve become a household name among system administrators. We’re closing in on protecting one billion web sites.

Short-lived and IP address certificates are now generally available from Let’s Encrypt. These certificates are valid for 160 hours, just over six days. In order to get a short-lived certificate subscribers simply need to select the ‘shortlived’ certificate profile in their ACME client. Short-lived certificates improve security by requiring more frequent validation and reducing reliance on unreliable revocation mechanisms. If a certificate’s private key is exposed or compromised, revocation has historically been the way to mitigate damage prior to the certificate’s expiration. Unfortunately, revocation is an unreliable system so many relying parties continue to be vulnerable until the certificate expires, a period as long as 90 days. With short-lived certificates that vulnerability window is greatly reduced.

When you request a certificate from Let’s Encrypt, our servers validate that you control the hostnames in that certificate using ACME challenges. For subscribers who need wildcard certificates or who prefer not to expose infrastructure to the public Internet, the DNS-01 challenge type has long been the only choice. DNS-01 works well. It is widely supported and battle-tested, but it comes with operational costs: DNS propagation delays, recurring DNS updates at renewal time, and automation that often requires distributing DNS credentials throughout your infrastructure.

The past was not as foreign as we think.

A web extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. requests to alternative privacy-friendly frontends

04/01/2025It is with heavy hearts that we report that Dave Täht has passed away.Dave was an amazing person, whose work on FQ-CoDel, CAKE, and LibreQoS changed the internet forever. He and Jim Gettys championed the fight against bufferbloat, working to improve the global internet, and to make smooth real-time communication viable for everyone, everywhere.Because of…

By following this guide, you will be able to successfully self-host your preferred DeepSeek model on a home lab or home office server, harnessing the

A community fork revives MinIO after the official repository was archived, restoring removed features and continuing open-source development.

TrueNAS deprecates its public build repository on GitHub, raising questions in the community about openness and release transparency.

Yserver is a new X11 server written in Rust, with working support for MATE, Xfce, Cinnamon, and classic window managers.