Cybersecurity Vendor Error Message: Taking Heat in UC Campus Big Data Surveillance Dispute?

Screenshot from Fidelis XPS web page 

The handling of a cybersecurity appliance manufactured by Fidelis is at the center of a dispute between University of California cybersec experts and UC administrators working to contain recent breaches. 

Whether by design or by accident, the vendor's web page describing the particular model involved is throwing this inelegant error.

SNIP According to a Univ of California faculty expert, . . .'These appliances, depending on how they are configured, can be privacy doomsday machines.'"

Full packet inspection = #BigData threatening #privacy | @academeblog @FidelisCyber #governance #standards http://bit.ly/1pj87IB @bigdatastandards #computersecurity #cybersecurity

FooPlugins - Internal Server Error

Webserver error at Fooplugins.com

Today this Apache webserver error is being thrown at Fooplugins. Will this ubiquitous error still be with us twenty years hence?

Technical Error, No ETA but Check Twitter

Screenshot from SocialOomph

A technical outage of some kind. ErrorProcessing says: (1) No ETA; (2) No suggested workarounds; (3) No links to help pages or status pages.

HTML5? Great. Now What About Webserver Error Handling?

I just saw a Google / Arcade Fire video that has been widely viewed (fun stuff!), but this blog post isn't about the video. Rather I was thinking about the apparent status quo with messages and error notification in use for webservers (yes, even vaunted Apache). Sure, there's an API so web developers can intercept the message and put up something more elegant, but the default error processing approaches the unusable. Further, it's often the case that the developer has little control over the cause of such errors. All the more reason for the web server to offer up something sensible. Given the ubiquity of Wikipedia, maybe the user should be directed there, where natural language content curation is held in higher regard than in developer communities. 

"Forbidden!" - It's not a game, Mildred

Give Google Sites a poorly formed URL and receive this message from the webserver. Error 403 is commonplace, routine in web dev circles, but isn't so common that users recognize its cause and realize that it's essentially innocuous. The "forbidden" message has a misleading tone.