TechMiso

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project have developed HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox extension aimed at forcing the browser to use https on certain web sites, thus assuring the privacy offered by browsing securely.

This Firefox extension was inspired by the launch of Google’s encrypted search option. We wanted a way to ensure that every search our browsers sent was encrypted. At the same time, we were also able to encrypt most or all of the browser’s communications with some other sites:

• Google Search
• Wikipedia
• Twitter and Identi.ca
• Facebook
• EFF and Tor
• Ixquick, DuckDuckGo, Scroogle and other small search engines
• and lots more!

Firefox users can install HTTPS Everywhere by following this link.

If you value your privacy online, or if you would like to ensure the prying eyes of your ISP are unable to spy on your web browsing – whether to perform deep packet analysis for advertising or to see if you are potentially infringing on the copyright cartel’s products – then this is a must-have extension.

This extension will not automagically make your entire web surfing encrypted. HTTPS Everywhere is designed to initiate https sessions for those web sites explicitly configured. For example, TechMiso does not currently offer an https option therefore this extension will not secure your browsing session with our miso soup loving site. Make sure you understand how this extension works before you install.

Too bad HTTPS Everywhere is currently Firefox-only. Considering how popular Google Chrome is these days I certainly hope they plan to develop a Chrome extension.

According to the Adobe Flash Player Team Blog, the long awaited Flash Player 10.1 has been released:

From hardware decoding to better buffering, p2p video, multicast and http streaming — there are many improvements in Flash Player 10.1 with regards to web video delivery and playback. For desktops, Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across supported operating systems. Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance, offering smoother frame rates, and reducing system resource utilization

There is a plethora of new features and improvements in Flash Player 10.1, all of which are clearly outlined on the Flash Blog. One thing to note, Flash 10.0 does not appear to be affected by the most recent critical vulnerability allowing attackers potential remote control of affected workstations.

The single-most sought after feature Mac OS X users will most likely enjoy is the addition of hardware decoding. This should make video playback on the Mac less jerky, and less processor intensive, potentially improving the use of Flash on that platform.

Adobe also added multi-touch support to Flash 10.1, in lieu of the hope that Flash will be added to the many mobile devices expected to be produced this year – iOS devices obviously excluded. Android 2.2 “Froyo” appears to be the front runner in the flash-for-mobile race.

Many companies are beginning to rollout touch enabled devices, and not just smartphones, but tablets as well as PCs like the HP Touchsmart. With Flash Player 10.1, you can take advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities using a new set of ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events, creating the ability to interact with multiple objects simultaneously or work with native gestures, such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. Multi-touch may be one of the most important features for developers and designers creating new content with the Flash Platform, knowing your implementations may be easily extended to devices with touch capabilities.

It looks like Adobe took their time to make Flash 10.1 a decent product. The only outstanding question is this: how many critical security vulnerabilities will be found in this version of Flash? Adobe seems to be the one company consistently producing exploit-riddled products.