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Web Browser Security Warnings

You may have received an error or warning in your web browser about a site you visit not being secure.  This can happen for many reasons.  Usually, the fault lies with the web server because the server administrator has not been keeping up with the latest security best practices or has made a mistake in implementing a security measure.  Nevertheless, in a surprising number of cases, the cause can be a non-server issue, such as your machine's clock being off by more than several minutes, or from your using a free public WiFi service that has a captive login portal.

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Tutorial: Getting started with web development using Vagrant/VirtualBox

Due to the interest received towards development/programming, in this blog post we're going to take the time to detail how to get started with web development using a local virtual machine environment.  We'll also go over how to write a simple "Hello World" script in PHP.  

  • git installed on host machine
  • Install VirtualBox
  • Install Vagrant
  • Ensure VirutalBox + Vagrant are compatible.
  • PuTTY or some other SSH client (Windows only, native in Linux)
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Tutorial: Embedding UT Box "Widgets" into Qualtrics Forms

The University offers a range of tools for accomplishing tasks through the web.  In today's blog post we are going to briefly describe how Qualtrics and UT Box can be used together to accomplish file uploading with form submission.

Qualtrics is a web-form service that allows researchers and others to create simple or complex web forms to collect user input, often in the form of surveys.  The input is stored and can be emailed to the form owners upon completion.  However, one

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Secure your Web Site Now!

The University's Information Security Office (ISO) has been scanning web sites on campus with greater-than-normal frequency lately looking for security issues, and this has generated a lot of security tickets!

If the issues uncovered by a scan are not addressed quickly, the ISO will quarantine the affected web site --- remove it from the network --- until the security issues are addressed. The best strategy is to secure your web site now, before the ISO finds something wrong with it that warrants putting it in quarantine.

There are many types of security issues found with web

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Upgrade Your Web Sites to SHA-256 SSL Certificates

Web sites still exist that either do not provide for https:// (secure http) traffic, or do, but with older SHA-1 certificates that do not implement the SHA-256 standard.  Here is why, if you own one of these sites, you should upgrade them now ---

The IT industry wants all web site traffic to be encrypted, and is employing different strategies to make that happen.  One is to increase the number of warning messages from web browsers about unencrypted or under-encrypted web pages.  Another is  Google's PageRank algorithm, which currently scores encrypted pages

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Upcoming SHA-256 SSL Certificate Requirements

Most web sites, e-mail servers, database servers, and other internet services protect their data with SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates to ensure the confidentiality and authenticity of the site and its data. An SSL certificate is a small data file that associates a cryptographic key to an organization or end user. Any time you use a browser to access a web site with the https:// protocol, the server is using an SSL certificate

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CNS Sites Vanity Names Now Available

As we published last week in CNS Sites: A Self-Service Web Hosting Platform, we've made available a self-service web hosting service called CNS Sites.

One of the problems with migrating an existing site to CNS Sites is changing the URL of your existing site.  To help with this, we've set up a proxy to provide "vanity domains" for existing sites moving to CNS Sites.  This means that if you have an existing site you want to move to CNS Sites, then in most cases you can keep

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Web Central and UTS Retirements

In the summer of 2016, Information Technology Services (ITS) will retire Web Central, the legacy shared Web hosting and UNIX Timesharing System (UTS) email service at the university.

Web Central Websites

• All Web Central websites within the www.utexas.edu domain and virtual hosts must be migrated or archived by the end of June 2016

• If you have not yet set a deadline for migrating your websites or determined that they can be archived, please email web@utexas.edu

• The

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