So my Saturday got eaten by a dog. Not a real one — POODLE, the SSL bug that Google's security team dropped on the world a few days back. Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption, which is a name somebody clearly worked hard on just to make the acronym spell something cute. It means SSLv3, the ancient encryption fallback that's been sitting quietly in every server config since forever, can be tricked into leaking bits of supposedly-encrypted data if an attacker can force a downgrade and sit on your connection. Not the end of the world for most people reading this on their couch, but if you run your own server (I do, this blog lives on a cheap little VPS I've had since 2012), it's the kind of thing you can't just shrug at.
I spent about two hours Saturday morning doing the thing every sysadmin-by-necessity does: reading just enough to be dangerous, then editing nginx.conf with shaking confidence. Added ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;, ripped SSLv3 out entirely, restarted, and ran the Qualys SSL Labs test about six times because I didn't trust the first result. Got an A. Felt disproportionately proud of myself for a config change that took eleven characters.
Here's my actual complaint, though: I have zero idea how many ancient devices out there are still relying on SSLv3 to talk to anything. Somewhere there's a guy running Windows XP with IE6 who's about to have a much worse afternoon than mine, and there's nothing anyone can do about it because that combination is basically unsupported at this point anyway. Turning off SSLv3 site-wide breaks compatibility for a sliver of visitors nobody can quantify. I did it anyway. If you're still on IE6 in 2014, honestly, I don't know what to tell you.
Then Thursday night, before any of that, I'd already burned two hours upgrading my iMac to Yosemite, because Apple pushed it out free on the 16th along with the new iPad Air 2 and the 5K iMac and a bunch of other hardware I'm not going to bother covering here since every other tech writer on the internet already wrote the same four paragraphs about it this week. What I will say: the new flat, translucent look takes some getting used to, and I don't love all of it. The Photo Booth icon in particular looks like it got run through a cheese grater. The new system font (it's Helvetica Neue now, replacing Lucida Grande) looks genuinely fuzzy on my old non-Retina 2011 MacBook Air, especially in the Mail sidebar at the default size — I had to bump text size up just to stop squinting.
Continuity is the feature I actually wanted, and it's the one that's let me down the most so far. The idea is great: your iPhone rings, and you can pick up the call right on your Mac. First two times I tried it, nothing happened. Third time it worked fine. I think it's a Bluetooth pairing thing more than an Apple thing, honestly, but "it works sometimes" isn't a great pitch for a headline feature. Handoff for picking up a Safari tab between phone and laptop has been more consistent, at least, and that one I've actually used every day since Thursday without thinking about it, which is sort of the whole point.
Between the two things I spent this weekend babysitting a fifteen-year-old encryption protocol into retirement and reformatting my expectations around some icons that used to look like real objects and now look like flat colored rectangles. Neither felt urgent in the moment. Both were the kind of maintenance that just quietly needs doing, the digital equivalent of finally cleaning the gutters.
My coffee was cold by the time I finished the SSL config, for what it's worth. Made a second cup, didn't drink half of it, and it's still sitting on my desk right now as I type this. Some things don't get fixed by a config file.