Ask Freelock

For the holidays, we're highlighting some awesome Free/Open Source software -- three amazing platforms that have gone far beyond any commercial/proprietary competitor.

New versions of Drupal core dropped today, to fix a file handling issue.

After assessing the patches, statements, and risks associated with this update, we have decided this is an important update to apply, but not urgent for most of the sites we manage.

A client asks about yet another hosting option:

The VPS-2000HA-S includes the following resources:

6GB RAM (burstable)

150GB SSD Disk space

5TB Monthly Bandwidth

4 free dedicated IP's

No, you should not. You should let us worry about them, and go back to your business.

Seriously, we're getting questions from all kinds of people about whether this matters. I'm a bit surprised that there is any question about that. Would you be concerned if your top salesperson was selling for somebody else? If your cashiers were jotting down credit card numbers when they charged a card? If your office became a well-known spot for illicit drug or gun dealers? If your office had a bunch of scammers squatting and running a pyramid scheme? If your confidential client information could be revealed as easily as using a bic pen on an old Kryptonite lock?

We've seen some variation of every single one of those scenarios. And all of them are possible with a remote code execution flaw in a web application, like yesterday's Drupal security vulnerability.

And yet people still

In September, Freelock was recognized as a leading web development company in Seattle by Clutch.

DevOps is the union of development, operations, and quality assurance -- but it's really the other way around.

Money is the very definition of motivation for many criminals. At least in the movies... In real life, there are plenty of criminals looking for ways to drain money out of bank accounts, buy stuff on other people's credit cards, intercept bank transfers, and more.

People who know me know I can get stubborn when I get sold on a particular technology. For the past year, my favorite is Matrix, a distributed chat system that addresses pretty much everything anyone wants from a messaging system. The only catch? Not that many "regular people" are using it yet.

Shan asks,

Richard asks:

Just a question after reading an article posted here back from January 21, 2016 on Drupal 8, why Freelock.com has not moved to Drupal 8?  Just wondering if there was a particular reason we should avoid before jumping in?  Thanks.

It's really a shame. Drupal Gardens has announced to its users that it's shutting down completely on August 1, and users need to move away from the service before it disappears.

How quick do pages on your site load? How quick should they load? How do you make pages load quicker?
Why should you care?