Category: SSL

Wi-Fi Done Right @ The Peninsula Hotel, Bangkok

In the past, I have written about the woes of international travel when it comes to keeping connected online with many hotels choosing to slug guests heavily for Wi-Fi in rooms with little or no coverage in common areas of the hotel. Yes, I can hear some of you crying that being on holiday should …

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Solving TLS Timeouts in FileZilla

Here’s something that I had observed today. When attempting to connect to my webhost today I found that it would accept my username and password however, when initiating TLS, it would timeout even though my website was up and I had seemingly reliable connectivity to my webhost. In order to resolve this problem I tried …

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SSL Support Extended in Windows Live Hotmail

Here’s a quick tip for tonight. A while ago I noted that Windows Live Hotmail gained optional forced SSL connectivity but at the expense of being able to access your account through the Windows Live Mail client software on your desktop. This was certainly a deal breaker for me as I prefer to use the …

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Beware of Facebook Offering to Switch Out of HTTPS

Facebook HTTP Fallback Message

Here’s a quick article for this evening. If you enabled the setting in Facebook to use HTTPS wherever possible you might find that when you attempt to use certain Facebook applications such as Networked Blogs (which I use to publish the blog to Facebook) it will come up with this screen: What people may not realise …

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Enable Stronger Security in Facebook

Facebook - Enable Secure Browsing

Here’s a quick tip and some news that might have flown under the radar for some. After the fuss and debacle created by the release of FireSheep and the ability for people to easily impersonate others on popular social networking sites such as Facebook it has become apparent that Facebook have now provided the ability …

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Secure Your Google Searches with SSL

A quick tip tonight. For a while, Google has allowed the use of SSL with its search product by manually visiting https://encrypted.google.com but this has not been widely advertised in the past. However, it seems for residents in the USA that this is now becoming the default search page when people are visiting the regular …

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HTTPS Everywhere – An Easier Way to Force SSL

HTTPS Everywhere Preferences

Last month, I covered how you could use Firefox with the NoScript add-on to force Secure HTTP (HTTPS) in order to protect yourself when using social networking websites on an unprotected wireless network or general usage anywhere else. The NoScript solution works fine but if you are less technically minded it could be a bit …

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Hotmail Finally Implements Complete SSL

Hotmail - Connect with HTTPS

In a development that could be seen as a response to the havoc that FireSheep has created in the last week, Microsoft has finally enabled complete SSL security for its Hotmail service. Previously, authentication would be encrypted using SSL but users would then be switched back to plain HTTP (which of course is insecure). The …

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BlackSheep – Detect FireSheep on an Unsecured Wi-Fi Network

Last week, I wrote about FireSheep,  a newly released add-on for Firefox, allowed everyone including amateur hackers and snoopers the ability to not only identify individual social networking sessions currently in progress but also the ability to impersonate those people. This was made possible by intercepting cookies being broadcast in the clear (i.e. completely unencrypted) …

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Force Secure HTTP with NoScript

NoScript - HTTPS Settings

Yesterday, I blogged about how FireSheep made it quite easy for the average person to impersonate other users on social networking websites that were using the same insecure wireless network. The simplest thing a user can do is to force secure HTTP (or HTTPS – HyperText Transport Protocol Secure) but this can be a chore …

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