Let this pledge be duly noted on the permanent record of the Internet. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but I’ll be finding out soon enough, and I plan to go out mad as
hell…
Imagine I’m in a desert, and there are two wells where I can obtain water. If I want to go to the nearest well, which well do I visit? Clearly, it depends one where I am standing.
It’s possible to draw a line dividing the desert. To the ‘left’ of the line, it’s nearer to go to the well on the well on the ‘left’, to the ‘right’ of the line, it’s closer to go to
the well on the ‘right’…
One of the things people often tweet to us @ncsc are examples of websites which prevent you pasting in a password. Why do websites do this? The debate has raged – with most
commentators raging how annoying it is.
So why do organisations do this? Often no reason is given, but when one is, that reason is ‘security’. The NCSC don’t think the reasons add up. We think that stopping password
pasting (or SPP) is a bad thing that reduces security. We think customers should be allowed to paste their passwords into forms, and that
it improves security…
Google has made much of their Accelerated Mobile Pages project as a solution to bloated websites and frustrated users. But could AMP actually be
bad news for the web, bad news for news, and part of a trend of news distribution that is bad for society in general?
I didn’t start out as strongly anti-AMP. Providing tools for making websites faster is always great, as is supporting users in developing countries with lighter-weight pages that
don’t cost them a month’s wages. It’s totally true that today webpages are in a pretty sorry state…
