HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.
Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site.
The HTTPS Everywhere extension fixes these problems by rewriting all requests to these sites to HTTPS.
The plugin currently works for:
Google Search
Wikipedia
Twitter
Facebook
most of Amazon
GMX
WordPress.com blogs
The New York Times
The Washington Post
Paypal
EFF
Tor
Ixquick
(and many other sites)
Note that some of those sites still include a lot of content from third party domains that is not available over HTTPS. As always, if the browser’s lock icon is broken or carries an exclamation mark, you may remain vulnerable to some adversaries that use active attacks or traffic analysis. However, the effort required to monitor your browsing should still be usefully increased.
TrueCrypt – Free Open-Source Disk Encryption Software
7.0
July 19, 2010
New features:
Hardware-accelerated AES (for more information, see the chapter Hardware Acceleration).
Note: If you want to disable hardware acceleration, select Settings > Performance and disable the option ‘Accelerate AES encryption/decryption by using the AES instructions of the processor‘.
A volume can now be configured to be automatically mounted whenever its host device gets connected to the computer (provided that the correct password and/or keyfiles are supplied). (Windows)
Note: For example, if you have a TrueCrypt container on a USB flash drive and you want to configure TrueCrypt to mount it automatically whenever you insert the USB flash drive into the USB port, follow these steps: 1. Mount the volume. 2. Right-click the mounted volume in the drive list in the main TrueCrypt window and select ‘Add to Favorites‘. 3. The Favorites Organizer window should appear. In it, enable the option ‘Mount selected volume when its host device gets connected‘ and click OK.
Also note that TrueCrypt will not prompt you for a password if you have enabled caching of the pre-boot authentication password (Settings > ‘System Encryption‘) and the volume uses the same password as the system partition/drive. The same applies to cached non-system volume passwords.
Partition/device-hosted volumes can now be created on drives that use a sector size of 4096, 2048, or 1024 bytes (Windows, Linux). Note: Previously only file-hosted volumes were supported on such drives.
Favorite Volumes Organizer (Favorites > ‘Organize Favorite Volumes‘ or ‘Organize System Favorite Volumes‘), which allows you to set various options for each favorite volume. For example, any of them can be mounted upon logon, as read-only or removable medium, can be assigned a special label (which is shown within the user interface instead of the volume path), excluded from hotkey mount, etc. The order in which favorite volumes are displayed in the Favorites Organizer window can be changed and it is the order in which the volumes are mounted (e.g. when Windows starts or by pressing the ‘Mount Favorite Volumes‘ hotkey). For more information, see the chapters Favorite Volumes and System Favorite Volumes. (Windows)
The Favorites menu now contains a list of your non-system favorite volumes. When you select a volume from the list, you are asked for its password (and/or keyfiles) (unless it is cached) and if it is correct, the volume is mounted. (Windows)
Security improvements:
In response to our public complaint regarding the missing API for encryption of Windows hibernation files, Microsoft began providing a public API for encryption of hibernation files on Windows Vista and later versions of Windows (for more information, see the section TrueCrypt 5.1a in this version history). Starting with this version 7.0, TrueCrypt uses this API to encrypt hibernation and crash dump files in a safe documented way. (Windows 7/Vista/2008/2008R2)
Note: As Windows XP and Windows 2003 do not provide any API for encryption of hibernation files, TrueCrypt has to modify undocumented components of Windows XP/2003 in order to allow users to encrypt hibernation files. Therefore, TrueCrypt cannot guarantee that Windows XP/2003 hibernation files will always be encrypted. Therefore, if you use Windows XP/2003 and want the hibernation file to be safely encrypted, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to Windows Vista or later and to TrueCrypt 7.0 or later. For more information, see the section Hibernation File.
Improvements:
Many minor improvements. (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)
Bug fixes:
Minor bug fixes. (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)
Removed features:
TrueCrypt no longer supports device-hosted volumes located on floppy disks. Note: You can still create file-hosted TrueCrypt volumes on floppy disks.
As a former professional cyclist, nothing beats the thrill of being in the peloton and racing towards the finish line. Although I’ve traded in my cycling career for life as a Googler, I’m still a fan and enjoy watching my former teammates and friends battle in races like the Tour de France, which started on Saturday. While the cyclists were preparing to tackle the pave of Arrenberg and the Cols in the Alps, I got to thinking about ways that we can bring that experience to the hundreds of millions of fans who will be following the Tour de France over the next few weeks. Google is home to many other cycling enthusiasts, so we got together to work on ways to build a My Tracks-based gadget that will allow all the other fans to follow the action like never before.
The My Tracks application for Android phones lets you record and share your own outdoor activities, and now Team HTC-Columbia will use a special version of the app with SRM to transmit their telemetry and location in real-time as they make their way through the 3,642 kilometers of the Tour de France. The nine riders (sadly, now eight, as Adam Hanson was injured on Sunday) on Team HTC-Columbia are carrying HTC Legend phones with ANT+ that use My Tracks to capture their location along with their power, heart rate, cadence and speed. On www.google.com/mytrackstour, you’ll see a Google Map showing the team members’ location on the course and a detailed telemetry report. You can observe how Michael Rogers’ heart rate spikes as he attacks the climbs in the Alps on Stage 9, see how many watts Mark Cavendish puts out in the sprint on the famous sprinters’ stage into Bordeaux, and see just how fast riders climb the famous Col du Tourmalet.
From the image above, you can see how Maxime Monfort took the lead during Stage 2 between Bruxelles and Spa yesterday. Right now, the riders are racing in Stage 3, which takes them across the border into France and you can follow all the latest action on our website or directly on your own iGoogle page.
The team also built a map gadget that is available for you to embed on your own website or blog. We’re also publishing an API that any web developer or broadcaster can use to build their own custom application or use to enhance the live television coverage. I’m excited about the potential for web developers and broadcasters to make use of the API and data in creative ways to help all the Tour de France followers (myself included!) get even closer to the action.
This project was the work of many Googlers in their 20% time, and as cycling fans ourselves, we’re happy to be able to share it with the world. We hope you enjoy this unique way of following Team HTC-Columbia over the next few weeks.
We would like to invite you to participate in the beta testing of our newest product, Acronis® True Image Home 2011 that provides the following new functionality:
New User Interface that simplifies all backup and recovery operations and consolidates all information about backups.
Better support for Windows 7. You can start, edit, explore or recover backups from Windows 7 Control Panel without starting Acronis® True Image Home 2011. Right-click on a file, folder or volume and see all versions available for recovery. Protect all your Documents, Music, Video, and Pictures in Windows 7 Libraries.
Acronis Nonstop Backup™ now protects individual folders and files and supports Acronis® Secure Zone® as a location for Nonstop backups. Content search is now available for Nonstop backups as well.
We are looking for feedback from both experienced and novice users about this beta and hope that you will be part of this important program. As a small token of our appreciation, we will award free licenses of Acronis® True Image Home 2011 (when released) to 10 best testers. After beta is complete, on this forum we will announce 10 beta testers who provided feedback that helped us the most to improve the product.
We hope you will find the Acronis® True Image Home 2011 product useful. We are constantly working to improve our software functions and ease of use. Please send us your feedback through the beta forum.
At the forum, you may also review all issues and questions regarding this beta submitted by other beta testers to the Acronis Beta Test Team.
Dmitri Joukovski
Vice President, Product Management
Acronis, Inc.
INFORMATION
You are receiving this e-mail because you have purchased Acronis products, registered one of our products or have requested e-mails from Acronis. Your information is used exclusively by Acronis to provide you with relevant product and company news. Acronis does not supply customer information to any third party.
If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, please manage your subscriptions on the Acronis web site.
E-MAIL OPTIONS: manage your subscriptions | send feedback | opt out
Shop for books in the Kindle Store optimized for your Android phone
Buy a book from the Kindle Store optimized for your Android phone and get it auto-delivered wirelessly
Search and browse more than 620,000 books, including 109 of 110 New York Times bestsellers. If you are a non-U.S. customer, book availability may vary
Find New York Times® Best Sellers and new releases from $9.99
Get free book samples. Read the beginning of books for free before you decide to buy
Books you purchase can also be read on a Kindle, computer, or other Kindle-compatible mobile devices
Kindle newspapers, magazines and blogs are currently not available on Kindle for Android
Kindle for Android is currently available for customers in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States
It seems to me the U.S. is not even close to the top 10 nations in download speed, and the fastest city within the United States doesn’t even break into the top 20, worldwide . . .
Posted by Arielle Reinstein, Product Marketing Manager
The more I use Google Docs, the less I have to deal with sending attachments back and forth. While attachments’ days may be waning, they’re still very much a part of most people’s email experience. Here are five things you may not know you can do with Gmail to make sending, receiving, viewing, and finding attachments easier:
1. Drag attachments in
Simply drag files from your desktop right into the message you’re composing and they’ll upload from there. (Make sure you’re using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6 for this to work.)
2. Select multiple attachments
Attaching multiple files one by one is no fun. Instead, just multi-select the files you want to attach by holding down the Ctrl key (or Command on a Mac) and clicking on each file you want to attach. Holding down the Shift key will select a continuous list of files.
3. Never forget an attachment again
Gmail looks for phrases in your email that suggest you meant to attach a file (things like “I’ve attached” or “see attachment”) and warns you if it looks like you forgot to do so. Every day, this saves tons of people the embarrassment of having to send a follow up email with the file actually attached.
4. View attachments online
When you receive an attachment, sometimes you just want to view it and there’s no need to download or save to your desktop. The Google Docs viewer allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser. Just click the “View” link at the bottom of the message.
5. Find that long lost attachment via search
If you’re looking for an attachment someone has sent to you, Gmail’s advanced search operators can help you find what you’re looking for quickly and accurately.
A couple examples:
To find all messages that contain attachments: has:attachment
To find all messages from your friend David that contain attachments: from:david has:attachment
To find all messages that have .pdf attachments: has:attachment pdf
To find a specific attachment named physicshomework.txt: filename:physicshomework.txt
With Google search over SSL, you can have an end-to-end encrypted search solution between your computer and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party. This provides you with a more secure and private search experience.
To use search over SSL, visit https://www.google.com each time you perform a search. Note that only Google web search is available over SSL, so other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL. When you’re searching over SSL, these properties may not appear in the left panel.
What is SSL?
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can’t be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).
What can I expect from search over SSL?
Here’s how searching over SSL is different from regular Google search:
SSL encrypts the communication channel between Google and a searcher’s computer. When search traffic is encrypted, it can’t be read by third parties trying to access the connection between a searcher’s computer and Google’s servers. Note that the SSL protocol does have some limitations — more details are below.
As another layer of privacy, SSL search turns off a browser’s referrers. Web browsers typically turn off referrers when going from HTTPS to HTTP mode to provide extra privacy. By clicking on a search result that takes you to an HTTP site, you could disable any customizations that the website provides based on the referrer information.
At this time, search over SSL is supported only on Google web search. We will continue to work to support other products like Images and Maps. All features that are not supported have been removed from the left panel and the row of links at the top. You’ll continue to see integrated results like images and maps, and clicking those results will take you out of encrypted search mode.
Your Google experience using SSL search might be slightly slower than you’re used to because your computer needs to first establish a secure connection with Google.
Note that SSL search does not reduce the data that Google receives and logs when you search, or change the listing of these terms in your Web History.
Does SSL provide complete security?
While SSL helps prevent intermediary parties, such as ISPs, from knowing the exact search that you typed, they could still know which websites you visit once you click on the search results. For example, when you search over SSL for [ flowers ], Google encrypts the query “flowers” and the results that Google returns. But when you click on a search result, including results like images and maps, you could be exiting the encrypted mode if the destination link is not on https://.
If your computer is infected with malware or a keylogger, a third party might still be able to see the queries that you typed. We recommend that everyone learns how to prevent and remove malware.
Remember that only Google web search supports search over SSL, so searching Google Images, for example, will not be encrypted.
While SSL is a clear privacy and security benefit, we are aware of some technical limitations to SSL at the protocol level that are not specific to Google’s implementation:
A determined, skilled malicious party could potentially interpose himself into the network traffic and present a spoofed certificate to the user. In many cases, this will result in a certificate warning to the user. If you see a certificate warning, the protection may not hold.
An adversary with the ability to install root certificates on the machine could potentially interpose himself into the network traffic without any warnings appearing.
A highly capable source may be in a position to sign certificates with a standard, pre-installed certificate authority (CA), which again would allow intercept without any apparent warnings to the user.
Even if all web searching occurs over SSL, a passive traffic listener may still be able to observe DNS look-ups.
How can I confirm whether I’m on a secure connection?
Check to see that the URL you’re on starts with https:// instead of http://. Most browsers provide a visual confirmation (such as an icon of a lock) in the address bar or in the status bar at the bottom of the page. On Google SSL search, you’ll also see a special Google SSL logo with a lock icon. In addition to this logo, be sure to also check the https:// text in the address bar and any browser lock icons.
When you perform a search on https://www.google.com, you might see a warning if a page has some non-secure components: depending on your browser settings, you might see the lock icon turn into a warning sign, a pop-up message, or some other form of alert. This issue is often referred to as a “mixed mode error.”
Since this is a beta feature, there might be some rare cases in search over SSL that generate a mixed mode error. We’re working to prevent such errors, and you can help if you report any errors through our Help Forum.
(full original text at http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=173733&hl=en )
If your organization uses Google Apps but you are not the administrator: Let your administrator know that Google Wave is available!
Google Wave is a part of Google Labs and there are a number of things we have planned before it will be ready for large-scale enterprise deployment, but this is an opportunity for you and your organization to try it out.
Join our webinar
To learn more, we invite you to join our webcast on Wednesday, May 26th at 9:00 am PDT. We will share real world use-cases from businesses and other organizations and answer your questions. Register for the webcast.
Google announced today Android 2.2, a major update for Google’s mobile operating system. There are many changes and a lot of new features that are really useful.
Android now uses a just-in-time compiler that improves the performance for some applications, especially for games. “The new Dalvik JIT compiler in Android 2.2 delivers between a 2-5X performance improvement in CPU-bound code vs. Android 2.1 according to various benchmarks,” says Xavier Ducrohet.
Android’s browser includes the V8 JavaScript engine created for Google Chrome, so web pages that use JavaScript heavily will load much faster (some benchmarks show a 2-3X improvement). Google claims that Android’s browser is the fastest mobile browser available today.
Developers have a new API for app data backup, which is really useful if you want to switch to a new Android device or you want to install a custom version of Android. There’s also an extremely useful messaging API for sending data to an Android phone from another device. For example, you’ll be able to send a link from your computer to your Android phone and the phone will automatically open the browser and navigate to the web address. You can also send files and install applications from your computer over the air.
Android Market will have a web interface, applications can auto-update and you can quickly install all the updates, instead of manually installing each update. Another change is that applications can be moved to the SD card. Google also announced that it has acquired SimplifyMedia, a company that developed some cool applications for streaming your music.
Android 2.2 has built-in support for tethering and it can transform a phone into a portable hotspot. Android Market includes some great applications for tethering, but it’s nice to see that’s now a built-in feature.
You can add multiple languages to the keyboard and switch between them by swiping across the space bar, there’s a new UI for the camera, there’s support for Exchange calendars and remote wipe, LED flash for the Camcorder, support for sharing contacts with other phones and much more.
Flash 10.1 is now available as a beta application in the Android Market, but it requires Android 2.2. Nexus One and Motorola Droid will be updated to Froyo next month. The other HTC phones launched this year will be updated in the second half of the year. “This includes popular models like the Desire and Droid Incredible as well as hotly anticipated phones like the Evo 4G, MyTouch slide and upcoming models.”
(yes, I’m hoping this capability comes to the HTC Hero (sprint version / cdma) soon ) – and for those wondering – relocation was typically painful, but is now complete
)
each time you perform a search. Note that only Google web search is available over SSL, so other search products like Google Images and Google Maps are not currently available over SSL. When you’re searching over SSL, these properties may not appear in the left panel.
