Echoes
Echoes
The Authentication System That Doesn't Call Home
India processes 2.5 billion authentication transactions monthly through a system that verifies identity locally. When a bank confirms who you are using Aadhaar, verification happens on their own systems—a digitally signed XML file, validated against a public key, entirely within the service provider's infrastructure.
The Authentication System That Doesn't Call Home
India processes 2.5 billion authentication transactions monthly through a system that verifies identity locally. When a bank confirms who you are using Aadhaar, verification happens on their own systems—a digitally signed XML file, validated against a public key, entirely within the service provider's infrastructure.
One Echo This Week
HTTP/2 Server Push arrived in 2015 with a straightforward promise: servers could send resources before browsers asked for them. The specification included the feature. Browsers implemented it. Then servers hit a wall. They couldn't determine what clients already had cached, which meant pushing resources that browsers didn't need. Bandwidth waste followed. Performance regressions appeared.
Chrome and Firefox removed Server Push in October 2024. Sites that had made it work measured real losses. One documented a 10% increase in time to first contentful paint. The intended replacement, 103 Early Hints, sits at 2.9% adoption. Organizations now inline critical resources again, sacrificing cache benefits to maintain performance. The old HTTP/1.x workarounds are back.
Papers That Built Infrastructure
REST Dissertation Defined Modern API Architecture
Fielding designed REST for hypermedia, yet "RESTful" became shorthand for any HTTP-based API design.
Builders navigate inconsistent patterns daily because most modern APIs ignore Fielding's actual constraints.
Papers That Built Infrastructure
SOAP Standardization Created Enterprise Web Services Complexity
SOAP made "simple" the defining criterion for every next-generation API design approach.
Enterprise systems still choose SOAP for formal contracts, creating integration friction with modern architectures.
Papers That Built Infrastructure
HTTP/2 Solved Application-Level Performance While Creating New Problems
Single connection eliminates overhead, but one lost packet blocks all multiplexed streams simultaneously.
Major browsers only support HTTP/2 over TLS despite the standard allowing unencrypted connections.
Papers That Built Infrastructure
Certificate Transparency Made TLS Certificate Issuance Public
Chrome requires Certificate Transparency since April 2018, making it essential for public web infrastructure.
Original design faces scaling challenges at 7-10 terabytes per log, pushing migration to tile-based architecture.
Today's Debates Yesterday's Decisions
