Encrypt The Web

There's a line from Spafford saying that most email was like a postcard. Anybody anywhere involved with moving it around could just read the back of the postcard and tell what the message is. And, honestly, this is true of the web, too. I've heard of stories where they hook a packet sniffer to the WiFi at conventions and such and sent all the images they grabbed to a projector. The stuff is wide open.

There are sites that use HTTPS, which encrypts your traffic. The sites that do tend to be banks and other financial institutions. And there was a time when I dreaded hitting a HTTPS site, because the computer would chug a bit at the decryption. But honestly, that was back when I was hating on Javascript because it did the same thing. I forget when I started saying it, I think it was around 2002, but there's no reason why every site isn't HTTPS. I don't care if it's only kitten videos, there is no reason for anyone between the server and me to know what I'm downloading.

Which is why I'm so happy to see this. The Electronic Frontiers Foundation has created a Firefox extension that pushes whatever traffic you're doing onto the HTTPS server. It doesn't work for everything, and it's in beta, but you can write your own rules. I'm a Chrome guy these days, but this is such a great idea.

I Like Chrome

And I think I'm about to switch from Firefox as my go-to browser.

I apt-get installed it a while ago, and Chrome's insistence on looking like Chrome when I wanted it to look and act like Ubuntu was an early problem. If I can't move a window like any other window, I can't use that window, and thus that program.

This was a problem until I realized you could tell it to use the system's Title Bar, which means when I double-clicked, it rolled up like any other window, and a right-click on the bar meant I could kick it to whatever virtual desktop I wanted. That was enough for me to take away most of my dislike.

But not all. I had been using Delicious as my online bookmarks storage. I had used Google Bookmarks before, but something kicked me off that a while ago. For the life of me, I cannot remember what. But I went to Delicious. Chrome doesn't sync with Delicious, but it does sync with Google Bookmarks. ::SHOCK!::

Delicious exports RSS. Chrome imports a special type of HTML. You need to convert. For this purpose, I wrote rss2bookmarks.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.010 ;
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use XML::RSS ;

# USAGE: rss2bookmarks.pl < input.rss > output.html

my %bookmarks ;

my $data ;
while (<STDIN>) { $data .= $_ }
my $rss = XML::RSS->new() ;
$rss->parse( $data ) ;

for my $item ( @{ $rss->{items} } ) {
    my $title = $$item{title} ;
    my $link  = $$item{link} ;
    $bookmarks{$title} = $link ;
    }

say '#<DL><p>' ;
say '    <DT><H3>Bookmarks Bar</H3>' ;
say '    <DL><p>' ;
for my $bookmark ( sort keys %bookmarks ) {
    my $link = $bookmarks{ $bookmark } ;
    say qq{    <DT><A HREF="$link"> $bookmark </A>} ;
    }
say '    </DL><p>' ;
say '</DL><p>' ;

Use it in good health.

Simple Firefox Hack ...

Want more than one "Home Page" in Firefox?

In the "Main" tab of your Preferences/Options, where it has the Home Page text bar, separate your preferred home page URLs with a pipe character (|).