Probably a good time for everyone to know about EFF's HTTPS Everywhere:
HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension that encrypts
your communications with many major websites, making your browsing more
secure. Encrypt the web: Install HTTPS Everywhere today.
On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Johan Jönsson <brevlistor(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
2015-03-10 13:26 GMT+01:00 Comet styles
<cometstyles(a)gmail.com>om>:
for an organization taking on the NSA for
"spying"..why are we using
https? doesn't that show that we are already scared of them and
running with our tail between our legs?
(For non-technical readers: the HTTP protocol is the normal way to send
around information on the web. HTTPS is the secure way of sending said
information, adding encryption among other things, to avoid eavesdropping.)
HTTP traffic can easily be tracked by people sharing the same network, by
your Internet service provider and so on. If one cares about privacy, HTTPS
is always important. It's worth noting that the NSA is not the only
government agency in the world. I'd be even more worried about a number of
countries where there would be little chance to fight the intruding party
in the courtroom.
Side note: you could probably track most HTTPS traffic to Wikipedia as
well, even if you're not the NSA. Normally you would see that the user has
accessed Wikipedia, but not which article. A way around that would be to
let a spider (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler) track the byte
size of Wikipedia articles, which should be individual enough as soon as
images are involved and compare it to the size of the page the user just
accessed. If two articles happen to be of exactly the same size, compare
with incoming and outgoing wiki links and see if the user accessed any page
linking to or linked from one the articles to determine which one. But it
would at least take some sort of effort, and wouldn't be perfect.
//Johan Jönsson
--
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