This is a simple solution for those of us wishing to use SSL whenever possible. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, The Pirate Bay, many more and hopefully soon to be many others offer an HTTPS as an option but only to those that try to use it.

HTTPS != Secure

I should probably say this because HTTPS/SSL is turning into a mindless buzzword.
Websites offering SSL do NOT...

• protect you from system attacks - a virus can be installed over SSL
• inherently hide the websites you're visiting - the browser URL will still be https://www.someweb2.0site.com/markmmanning
• mean that the website will always use HTTPS - Yahoo lets you connect using HTTPS and then automatically redirects you to HTTP after you've logged in

Websites offering SSL do...

• encrypt your web traffic from browser to web server
• protect you from attackers sniffing on your network

NoScript

NoScript R0ckz! I'm not even going to talk about them because you should know. Check them out here.

• Install NoScript
• Click on the the icon and go to options
• Click the Advanced tab and HTTPS
• In the "Force the following sites to use secure (HTTPS) connections:" add in all of your favorite websites
• Click ok and test it out

External Links

http://noscript.net/ - NoScript website
http://fscked.org/projects/cookiemonster - the reason why HTTPS doesn't mean you're secure. CookieMonster is a sidejacking tool with support for attacking SSL connections.

I'm adding this entry for the following reasons:

1. Bash scripting is fun!
2. I like minimalistic ways of doing things
3. It makes me laugh

Why

I know this doesn't matter but adds to why I'm doing this. I'm trapped in a far off land for three months and even though I've setup my servers in a remote location, I failed to realized how little a VMWare ESX server has from command line. I discovered this when I had forgotten all of the IP's for the other servers on my network. I know someone is going to say why didn't you just create a tunnel with ssh and blah blah blah but yes, ESX has limited configuration settings for that as well.

So here is what no one is waiting for: the extremely slow way of performing a ping sweep on your network from bash. If nothing else, it's given me an even better appreciation for nmap and other network scanning tools.

UPDATE: 3/4/2009 Just look at this and realized a for loop would be better.

for i in {1..255}; do ping 10.0.0.$i -c 1 | grep "time=";done
Obviously change 10.0.0. to whatever your subnet is.