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Aug
05

Vendetta-Online.com now More Secure and SPDY!

As of last week, the vendetta-online.com website is now running from a totally new and updated webserver, with significantly more bandwidth, sixteen times as much ram as the old machine, and four times as many cores.

We used to only encrypt website traffic when you were really using a "secure" area, like viewing important account information. Now, however, you may notice the browser's Lock icon appears constantly: The entire website is 100% encrypted at all times, and non-encrypted traffic is no longer supported. We're also offering some of the more recent cryptographic enhancements, like the Google-supported ChaCha20/Poly1305 cipher, for those on Chrome browsers, as well as protocol enhancements like SPDY, to make the site load considerably faster. Towards the end of the year, we expect to also support the next-generation web protocol HTTP/2 as well. We'll be continuing to tinker with the site over the coming months, as things stabilize, further extending our support for HTTP Strict Transport Security (also pre-loading the site into browsers), and adding HTTP Public Key Pinning.

The upshot of which is: The site should now be more robust, more secure, and faster than ever. It is still built with our same degree of care and heightened security-paranoia, so we hope it will be a great home for a long time to come. The internet has taken a lot of security hits over the last couple of years, from major SSL exploits like Heartbleed, to revelations about eavesdropping, and now the recent Android Stagefright bug. The best anyone in our position can really do, is build the best infrastructure we can imagine, and keep a watchful eye on the horizon. That's part of what this new site and system is about: a new setup to help mitigate potential unforeseen attacks, while also letting us react more quickly to news of brand-new bugs or issues.

Migrating this site took quite a lot of time, as it's a pretty complex endeavor, but we're very happy to have it out of the way. We're still going to be doing more server-migration work over the coming weeks, this time working on the game-server itself, to make for a faster and more scalable game environment. These changes haven't happened yet (we'll post again when they're in place), but we're hoping for faster sector load-times, faster player inventory access, and potentially opening up the ability to experiment with much larger space battles and other content.

We've also had some bugs appear lately in the game-update software, which we want to patch and improve as soon as possible. None of this is really the most exciting stuff to develop, we would rather be working on gameplay; but getting the infrastructural issues out of the way will give us a much better foundation on which to launch Vendetta Online 1.9.. and beyond!