I was sitting in a local coffee shop recently and, since I was bored, I kicked on a Windows instance in VirtualBox on my Mint Linux-powered laptop so I could run Firesheep. Firesheep was, and is, a hacking program meant to frighten people into being serious about their Wi-Fi security. It didn’t work. Most people, and Web sites, still don’t secure even their logins. So, sure enough, out of twenty-one active Wi-Fi connections, I could look over the shoulder of twenty of them. This is just sad.
Still, some interactive Web sites are finally adding basic security. The Google sites support Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its ancestor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for protection, Facebook added encypted security early this year, and now Twitter is joining the list of sites that use SSL to secure its users’ connections.
It’s about time!