Without the support of two major browsers and major websites most internet users are missing out on the security benefits of perfect forward secrecy. Without the protection of PFS, if an organisation were ever compelled — legally or otherwise — to turn over RSA private keys, all past communication over SSL is at risk. Perfect forward secrecy is no panacea, however; whilst it makes wholesale decryption of past SSL connections difficult, it does not protect against targeted attack on individual sessions. Whether or not PFS is used, SSL remains an important tool for web sites to use to secure data transmission across the internet to protect against (perhaps all but the most well-equipped) eavesdroppers.

If you are a web developer, you’ve probably heard of nginx (pronounced engine-x). Nginx is a fast and extremely powerful http and reverse proxy server that can be used to quickly and easily serve webpages. § Unfortunately, like many sysops tools, there is very little documentation and very few tutorials that explain how it works and how to get up and running. There is a wiki, which is extensive and confusing - showing you all possible options rather than presenting the important ones as you need them. After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up.

mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them. It does this by rewriting the resources using filters that implement web performance best practices. Webmasters and web developers can use mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages when serving content with the Apache HTTP Server.

mod_pagespeed includes several filter that optimize JavaScript, HTML and CSS stylesheets. It also includes filters for optimizing JPEG and PNG images. The filters are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who set up mod_pagespeed in addition to configuring proper caching and compression on their Apache distribution should expect to see an improvement in the loading time of the pages on their websites.

In computer networking, the term quality of services (QoS) describes resource management rather than the quality of a service. Quality of services implements control mechanism to provide different priority to different users, applications, and data connections. It is used to guarantee a certain level of performance to data resources. The term quality of service is often used in the field of wide area network protocols (e.g. ATM) and telephony (e.g. VoIP) but rarely in conjunction with web applications. mod_qos is a quality of service module for the Apache web server implementing control mechanisms that can provide different priority to different HTTP requests.