What Good Are VPNs?
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Good at some things, bad at others. At the most basic level, a VPN is an end-to-end service that encrypts network activity on one end and decrypts it at another. Depending on what kind of platform you are on, VPNs can be installed at different and deeper layers of the network stack. That’s all it is. Encrypted data at one end, decrypted data at the other. Anything else is fluff, extras added on top. …
HTTPS Is About Respecting Your Users
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Respect Your Users As of July 24th, 2018, Google Chrome is visibly marking all non-HTTPS sites as “not secure”. In light of this, it might be prudent to elaborate on what exactly HTTPS is meant to do. A site without HTTPS is vulnerable to Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks, which Troy Hunt shows off convincingly over at https://www.troyhunt.com/heres-why-your-static-website-needs-https/ That site is all about demonstrating through words, video, and actions, what happens when you don’t have HTTPS. What I want to touch on is why, morally speaking, HTTPS is a good thing. …
Towards a Secure and Private Firefox Installation
Thursday, July 5, 2018
With the massive overhaul that was Firefox Quantum (FF57), it’s worth checking out how to make a modern Firefox install secure. Much of modern Firefox’s security comes from the fact that in addition to doing extensive work on the architecture underlying the browser as a whole, they also removed the old extensions system. That has been a double-edged sword, because many beloved extensions relied on the that old architecture, but the Firefox developers have been working closely with the authors of popular extensions to add back in the necessary pieces they require. …