This year I attended Shmoocon. Unfortunately, I could only go for the last day because I was in Jamaica for the first two days (which was pretty great). As I took a look through the list of talks, the one that stuck out to me as most interesting was “Encrypting the Web Isn’t Enough: How EFF Plans to Encrypt the Entire Internet“. To summarize the talk, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is working hard to ensure that all of our internet traffic is encrypted. This includes web traffic, but also mailserver communications. The statistics in the slides were staggering with how impressive their efforts have been. When I created this blog not too long ago, I wanted to set up HTTPS on my site because I too believe that every website should have this enabled, but for whatever reason I was running into issues when trying to issue certs manually through my hosting site and the domain registrar. I actually ended up forgetting about setting up HTTPS on my blog until this talk. I used Certbot — (https://certbot.eff.org/) and within less than 10 minutes I had HTTPS automatically enabled on my website, as well as automatic renewal set up. Incredibly easy, and I encourage anyone reading this post to utilize this wonderful and free service. As well as enable “HTTPS Everywhere”, a free browser plugin created by the EFF development team. At Shmoocon, I was pleased to donate some money towards EFF after this talk because of how great they are.
https://www.shmoocon.org/speakers/#eff
https://www.eff.org/pages/tools
https://certbot.eff.org/
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join-eff-4
