Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Once you’ve recognized the importance of encrypting your Internet communications, the next step, of course, is to figure out how you plan to do this.

As with anything you intend to incorporate into your daily lifestyle, it’s important that you make a few key decisions up front, before you’re too committed to a particular approach. It’s also quite important that you find a relatively painless way to implement your plan: if it takes too much manual work, you’re not likely to do it all the time.

You Can’t Do It Alone

Encryption is about communication, and communication implies at least two parties. Whichever approach you settle upon for your day-to-day encryption, you will have to consider those with whom you will be communicating the most. This means you’ll want to select a technology that most of your friends and family will have readily available to them, as well. For example, if you wish to communicate with me, you will want to select an OpenPGP compatible solution, as I primarily use PGP Desktop Home for my regular correspondence.

X.509 Certificates

The easiest solution, though also the most expensive, is to purchase a client certificate from a trusted certificate authority, and install it into your favorite email client. There are a handful of certificate authorities which issue free certificates (albeit with no personally identifying information), but most of these are untrusted by the major operating systems. I’m aware of only one free certificate that is trusted by all the major operating systems, www.startssl.com.

As a software developer, I have used digital certificates in quite a few of my corporate software solutions, but I prefer to avoid the hassle and expense of paying for my certificates every year, for my personal use.

OpenPGP Keys

Back in 1991, Phil Zimmermann created the first “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP) program, to enable political activists to secure their online communications. He released the source code into the public domain, because he felt that encryption technology was something that average people should have access to, not just corporate and government developers.

This is the approach I have settled on, for my own personal correspondence. While the technology is often a little bit more finicky to get working, because it’s mostly open source software, it’s the most popular protocol amongst non-governmental types, and there are quite a few innovative solutions based on it (such as encrypting instant messaging conversations and VOIP telephone calls).

My Current Implementation

At the moment, I am using Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta 2, as my primary email client, and PGP Desktop Home v9.10.

I won’t go through a step-by-step installation guide, as whatever software you select will already have such. In my case, PGP Desktop was an ideal solution because, though it cost me $99 to purchase a license, it uses a client-agnostic proxy that filters my incoming and outgoing email traffic. It also intercepts AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) traffic and encrypts it, as well!

If you are using Outlook 2003 or 2007, there is an open source plugin called GpgOl that is available, as part of an overall Windows-oriented package of GPG (open source version of PGP) tools called Gpg4Win. As of today, I have been unable to get GpgOl to work in Outlook 2010, though I’ve seen a few comments on the support forum by folks who claim to have made it work. I’m thinking, maybe, they had it installed before they upgraded Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2010.

While I was investigating software implementations of PGP for Windows, I also came across a product called cGeep that looked very promising. It also uses the Outlook plugin approach, though, so I decided to go ahead and pay a little more to get PGP’s proxy, so I could know it will work with the cutting edge, beta software that I often run.

What Are You Waiting For?

If you value your privacy and individual liberties at all, I strongly encourage you to invest an hour or two setting up an encryption system on your computer. If you need any technical assistance, I can’t promise to be an expert, but I’d be happy to assist however I can.

OK, after I got all excited about Firefox 3 coming at the end of the month, I noticed Benjamin Golub posted a link over on FriendFeed, that says the Firefox team is hoping to release it on the 17th.

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavor to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready“. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.

That’s even better news! Hopefully, they’ll pull it off…

Ever since Internet Explorer 7.0 came out, I’ve been a huge fan of Firefox! Of course, those of you who actually know me, know that I have a long history with Microsoft products, and I’ve been accused of being biased… though, as much as it’s possible to be objective, I genuinely think I do give a fair chance to a wide variety of technologies.

Granted, I just used Internet Explorer for most of my life on the web, but really that was more about the fact that I prefer to keep my core technology stack simple: stick with a single vendor as much as possible, to remove the inevitable conflicts and hassles that arise from too many cooks in the pot, so to speak.

Anyway, I’m digressing from my intended point, here. After IE 7 was released, I really tried to use it as my primary browser. I tried really, really hard to ignore the huge number of annoyances… as a software developer, I also prefer to keep my operating system configured the way most of my users will have it, so I learned to live with the new User Account Control (UAC) features of Windows Vista, that forever ask you if you’d like to grant permission to do this or that. Well, the combination of UAC and the obsessively over-strict security features of IE 7 just made my day-to-day life on the web unbearable!

So, I downloaded Firefox and started using that. Now, I can keep all of my open sites in a single browser instance, regardless of the “security zone”. There is a practically infinite number of extensions and add-ons that let me conform the browser to “my way” of doing things. The only reason I ever launch Internet Explorer, these days, is to log into my company’s web-based VPN that is also obsessively over-strict, and won’t work right with Firefox!

Since about Beta 4, I’ve been running Firefox 3. It’s been great, albeit missing a few add-ons. Well, it does crash quite a bit… but, I’m rather used to that, having spent the last ten years or so, using nothing but Internet Explorer!

Like anyone else who loves Firefox, as I have grown to, I am really looking forward to the final release of Firefox 3.0, but the Firefox team has been pretty quiet about the exact date they anticipate releasing. They’re requesting pledges from people to download their copy of Firefox 3 on the very day it releases, so they can set a world record for the highest number of downloads in a single day! Yet, they still won’t say just what day that will be…

Well, it seems they might have let the release date known to some key partners, perhaps, because I discovered this website tonight (thanks to Danny on Lockergnome for pointing it out):

Is June 27th the right date? I don’t know, but it gives us something to count down to, at least!