Thursday, November 26, 2015

Adding SSL

I've read several blog posts by people who say that they refuse to visit or link to web sites that do not SSL.

I would never enter a credit card number of buy from a web site that does not use SSL, but I have never been so paranoid as to refuse to visit unencrypted web sites.

SSL does not encrypt the meta data left by your computer browsing. A hacker who finds out that you visited this blog will see exactly what you see when you visited this blog ... just a bunch of opinionated posts by a computer hack.

SSL certificates do not prevent advertisers from tracking your every move. They only prevent people who are sniffing web traffic on a router from seeing the content that you see. 

I have not added SSL certificates to all my sites for a very simple reason. The certificates are expensive and require regular maintenance. A certificate for a single subdomain costs  about $70 per year. (The sale price of certificate at Godaddy was $62 on 11/26/2015) Wildcard subdomains cost several hundred dollars.

The cost of SSL is prohibitive for charities, small businesses, and information sites.

This particular blog is hosted by Google on blogspot. I decided to turn on the SSL option. You can see the SSL version the site at https://communitycolor.blogspot.com. Google is a huge company at the center of the Internet world; So, I guess they are able to get wildcard SSL certificates at a sufficient discount that allows them to give the things away.

Turning on SSL is a simple matter of going into settings page on blogger.com and clicking SSL.

They only have SSL options for sites ending in blogspot.com. I cannot add SSL to my other blogspot blog blog.yintercept.com.



*It is possible to add a self-signed certificate to a web site. Internet browsers raise a warning when you enter a web site with a self signed certificate. I find the warnings silly because a site with a self signed certificate is more secure than a site with no certificate.

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