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With bug bounties becoming an established industry-wide best practice, it’s important for us to establish our own. With the results we receive from the TTS Bug Bounty, we look forward to establishing a permanent program that involves most — if not all — TTS-owned websites and web applications.
Continue reading about The next step towards a bug bounty program for the Technology Transformation Service -
The White House HTTPS policy generated significant HTTPS adoption in the U.S. government. HTTPS is now used for most web requests to executive branch .gov websites, and the government now outpaces the private sector on HTTPS.
Continue reading about Tracking the U.S. government's progress on moving to HTTPS -
We’ve added agency-specific dashboards to analytics.usa.gov! Starting today, you’ll see a dropdown from the main analytics.usa.gov page that allows you to view the same dashboard, but filtered for websites that are administered by one of 10 specific agencies.
Continue reading about analytics.usa.gov: Now with agency-specific dashboards -
We’ve recently added a few new features to analytics.usa.gov: location data, download data, and expanded downloadable files.
Continue reading about analytics.usa.gov: New features and more data -
18F uses HTTPS for everything we make, and the U.S. government is in the process of transitioning to HTTPS everywhere. As part of this effort, we've recently partnered with DigitalGov University to produce a two-video series introducing the why's and how's of HTTPS.
Continue reading about An introduction to HTTPS, by 18F and DigitalGov University -
Today, the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) finalized an HTTPS-Only Standard for all publicly accessible federal websites and web services. This standard is designed to ensure a new, strong baseline of user privacy and security across U.S. government websites and APIs.
Continue reading about The U.S. government is moving to HTTPS everywhere -
The U.S. federal government is launching a new project to monitor how it's doing at best practices on the web. A sort of health monitor for the U.S. government's websites, it's called Pulse, and you can find it at pulse.cio.gov.
Continue reading about Taking the pulse of the federal government's web presence -
Max Ogden and Mathias Buus Madsen are visiting 18F today to talk about dat, an open source project for versioning and sharing datasets. This new piece of software is part of their effort to build “automated, reproducible data pipelines that sync.
Continue reading about The dat team talks data Streams -
The U.S. federal government now has a public dashboard and dataset for its web traffic, at analytics.usa.gov. 18F worked with the Digital Analytics Program, the U.S. Digital Service, and the White House to build and host the dashboard. Read on to learn about how the dashboard works, the engineering choices we made, and the open source work we produced along the way.
Continue reading about How we built analytics.usa.gov -
Today, the White House's Office of Management and Budget is releasing a draft proposal for public comment: The HTTPS-Only Standard, at https.cio.gov. This proposal would require all new and existing publicly accessible federal websites and web services to enforce a secure, private connection with HTTPS Feedback and suggestions during this public comment period are encouraged, and can be provided on GitHub or by email.
Continue reading about For public comment: the HTTPS-only standard -
Every .gov website, no matter how small, should give its visitors a secure, private connection. Ordinary HTTP (http://) connections are neither secure nor private, and can be easily intercepted and impersonated. In today's web browsers, the best and easiest way to fix that is to use HTTPS (https://).
Continue reading about The first .gov domains hardcoded into your browser as all-HTTPS -
We're happy to say that the .gov registry is now releasing the entire set of 5,300 .gov domains, including those outside of the federal executive branch.
Continue reading about A complete list of .gov domains -
The history of open source software is a record of steadily turning tremendously expensive custom-built solutions into freely available infrastructure that you can simply take for granted. What once were astoundingly sophisticated, expensive human endeavors have become open source tools you can drop into place in your project on a whim.
Continue reading about How to use more open source in your next federal IT acquisition -
How we moved our website to Jekyll, left Tumblr behind, and set up automatic deployment with webhooks.
Continue reading about Taking control of our website with Jekyll and webhooks -
18F uses HTTPS in every .gov website we make, so that our users have a fast, secure, private connection.
Continue reading about Why we use HTTPS for every .gov we make -
As demand for information continues to grow, it is important to continue iterating the ways we refine the FOIA request process. Our effort is one of a number of commitments towards creating a more open, transparent government. We will explore how to supplement the work that has already been done by creating tools to improve the online FOIA requests process by designing for the user.
Continue reading about A new look at the Freedom of Information Act -
Open source your code from day one. Don't wait for a milestone, don't wait for it to be stable — do it from the first commit.
Continue reading about Working in public from day one -
At 18F, we place a premium on developing digital tools and services in the open. This means contributing our source code back to the community, actively repurposing our code across projects, and contributing back to the open source tools we use. For a variety of reasons, we believe that doing so improves the final product we create.
Continue reading about 18F: an open source team -
We recently released the first version of our API Standards — a set of recommendations and guidelines for API production. It is our intention that every 18F API meet these standards, to help us ensure a baseline quality and consistency across all APIs we offer now and in the future.
Continue reading about Hot off the press: 18F's API standards -
June 27, 2014, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Register now. GSA’s digital teams are offering a user-friendly intro course to APIs. Regardless of your skill level, you will walk away from this lesson understanding what APIs are and how developers use them.
Continue reading about Intro to APIs: Working with URLs, JSON, APIs, and Open Data — without writing any code