HTTPS Everywhere
HTTPS is HTTP with encryption. Some of you knew that. Encryption is good because it makes you less exposed to eavesdropping. Some of you knew that too.
Now, when you click on a link in a web page, that link is either HTTPS or HTTP. Most often it’s the latter, giving you the next page without encryption. But with the new Firefox extension from EFF and The Tor Project this problem has a solution called HTTPS Everywhere.
For this to work, the site you are visiting has to support HTTPS, that’s nothing you can change with a browser. But luckily enough most of them do. HTTPS Everywhere works by rewriting links that you click and makes your browser ask for the HTTPS equivalent of the HTTP link.
The version I’m using (0.1.1) has rulesets for the following sites:
- Scroogle
- Tor Project
- GoogleServices
- Noisebridge
- NYTimes
- Mozilla
- Wikipedia
- PayPal
- Google Search
- WashingtonPost
- EFF
- Ixquick
- Identica
- DuckDuckGo
- GentooBugzilla
Learn how to write your own ruleset here.
I’ve been using HTTPS Everywhere for a couple of days now without any other hassles than Twitter being a bit slow. Then again, Twitter is always kind of weird so I don’t know who’s to blame here.
Anyway, give it a try!