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Yesterday, while assessing a new client site, we ran across a technology we have not seen before: Sphinx Search.

As I write, we're in the midst of a big Ransomware attack. Millions of computers have been infected, with their data encrypted, held ransom pending an extortion payment or deleted. Supposedly.

A past customer just called, with email trouble... suddenly their email had stopped delivering. This customer had been acquired by another company, and we had shut off their web hosting service months ago, as their website had been retired.

On one of our D8 sites, after upgrading to 8.3.0, we had a "too many redirects" loop going on on the dev server. For quite some time, we've had the site path repeated with "?q=".

Extreme irony: the person most responsible for making Drupal a mature, stable, long-term platform has been ejected from a leadership role for reasons that are not entirely clear. As a result, the Drupal community itself is going through a painful crisis.

Yesterday Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a major outage in their US-East datacenter, in Virgina. It made all sorts of national news, largely because it affected some major online services.

Last week the Note to Self podcast put together a thought-provoking, action-inspiring series called The Privacy Paradox.

[Update: It turns out the Drupal 7 site we tested had page caching disabled.

Starting this month, Chrome users are going to start seeing a lot more sites flagged as insecure. Google is firmly on the technologist side of the encryption war, and it wants to make encryption something regular people care about. Why?
Not using encryption is like sending everything you visit/everything you do, scrawled upon postcards, with stops in all sorts of places, passing by people you would not want seeing everything.

Panacea, or disaster? Drupal 8 Configuration Management was supposed to solve all our woes when it came to dealing with deploying configuration. In many ways it's a vast improvement, but in some ways it has almost made matters worse.

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,