[sf-lug] An unpleasant experience

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> Wait, what? I greatly appreciate the nice words, but
> voyager640 at gmail.com is not me (and I usually sign my messages
> and definitely would never sign off with "Sent from my iPhone".

Well, sorry about that.  I see what happened:  It appears that Jim (the
listadmin) has recently caused Mailman to auto-append a footer to all
postings to the sf-lug mailing list that advertises your blog and a
second Web site.  I misparsed that, at the time, as your .sig block.
(It was late.)

> But now I'm probably going to destroy your high opinion of me by
> asking a dumb question. Earlier in this thread, you mentioned HTTPS
> Everywhere as "essential!"

In addition to encouraging https wherever feasible even if you forget to
specify it, HTTPS Everywhere is 'essential' in my view because it
protects against SSL stripping.  https://moxie.org/software/sslstrip/


> Of course, I always check the urlbar to make sure I'm using HTTPS
> before entering a password or other private information. 

This is a good idea.  According to the author of sslstrip (URL above),
even careful users can be occasionally mislead by supplying a
favicon that looks like a lock icon (or a homograph-similar https link, 
though that's a different thing).

> Regarding private browsing mode:  I keep a private browser around
> since so many sites don't work at all with noscript (you mentioned
> that it simplifies web pages ... I find it simplifies many pages to
> the point where there's no content at all, just a blank white empty
> space).

Yep, thus the learning curve.  ;->

> I used to keep a separate firefox profile with all defaults,
> no noscript or adblock or cookie blocking or anything, and then call
> it up as "firefox --private-window -new-instance -P Default" whenever
> I hit a site I wanted to look at that didn't work in my normal firefox
> window. But I got tired of the waiting: even when firefox libraries
> are already loaded, starting up a new profile still takes too long.
> So I scripted a minimal python-webkit-gtk browser that starts up
> much faster and doesn't store any cookies or other identifying info.
> Having a quick-starting private browser also turned out to be useful
> for displaying non-plaintext messages and attachments from mutt.

Sure, that can solve some problem situations -- but you probably
wouldn't want to use python-webkit-gtk for all your browsing.  (All I
said was that Firefox's private browsing mode is impractical for general
use.)


>         ...Akkana
> 
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