Large companies aren’t good homes for beloved services

Large companies aren’t good homes for beloved services by Colin Devroe (Colin Devroe)

Over the last year I’ve moved my use of platforms, services, or products to things I can control long term or are open source. Examples include my photo management process no longer being reliant on the cloud, my content all being on my own domain, and my site being on my own infrastructure. I still have more work to do but I want to future proof as much of the stuff I care about as I can.

Good for you, Colin. Several years ago, I started the process of disengaging and migrating from a dependence on large online service because I valued my privacy and freedom. Glad to see that some people are finally catching on.

CipherScan

Using cipherscan to test the TLS certificate configuration of my web server.

Cipherscan tests the ordering of the SSL/TLS cyphers on a given target, for all major versions of SSL and TLS. It also extracts some certificates information, TLS options, OCSP stapling and more. Cipherscan is a wrapper above the OpenSSL s_client command line.

Cipherscan is meant to run on all flavors of UNIX. It ships with its own built of OpenSSL for Linux/64 and Darwin/64. On other platforms, it will use the OpenSSL version provided by the operating system (which may have limited ciphers support), or your own version provided in the -o command line flag.