We The Free

I’ve decided to migrate to WordPress as it allows me to change the dates of old posts, so I’ve reposted everything from this site’s WolfCMS blog and have yet to do the following:

• Update other pages from the original site (such as gallery, articles, and “stuff”)
• Add my sidebars with my cool linkages from the original site
• Migrate over my old BlogSpot blog
• Migrate over my old LiveJournal
• Possibly consider migrating content from my old fatbastards.net.nz site which dates back to 1999-2000, and is archived on the Wayback Machine (sans images)

It’s going to be a bit of work, but I’d like everything in one place, and once I find a nice theme for WordPress, it’ll be so much the better.

After spending a weekend at a (really frackin’ cool) hacker con, and while setting up some bookmarks on my laptop, I decided to make all my login links point to https pages — because when you’re on an open wireless network, all your traffic is being sniffed by at least one person.

It’s well known that TradeMe store your password in a plaintext cookie in your browser, but that’s OK (?) because your box has to be owned before that matters. However, people sniffing network traffic shouldn’t be able to sniff your password. And given that most people use wireless now, the likelihood of this is pretty high. So I tried to change that http://www.trademe.co.nz to https://www.trademe.co.nz. Should be a simple thing — one extra character on your URL ensures all your requests are encrypted.

OK, so I hit their site with https, and my browser tells me there’s something funny about the certificate. Really? Were they too cheap to get it signed by a known Certificate Authority? I mean it’s a few hundred bucks a year, but this was a company that was purchased by Fairfax for seven hundred fucking million dollars. Plus an extra $50 million if they met certain targets over the next two years, which apparently they did.

Right, so they can afford a cert.

I pull the cert up to have a look at it and find something a bit more innocent. It was registered with a proper CA, but they registered secure.trademe.co.nz and www.secure.trademe.co.nz (the latter of which, incidentally, doesn’t even resolve in DNS). But, no problems, I plug https://secure.trademe.co.nz expecting to get to a secure login page. Guess what? It just automatically redirects to http://www.trademe.co.nz. WTF? I tried appending /Members/Login.aspx at the end of that secure URL and I still get redirected. Try it yourself: https://secure.trademe.co.nz/Members/Login.aspx

Thanks TradeMe, I can’t use your site while I’m on a wireless network.

If anyone from TradeMe ever reads this, why did you buy a certificate if it isn’t being used? And why can’t I log in via SSL? This isn’t complicated shit (nor expensive) we’re talking about. I’d offer to fix it for you guys, but you couldn’t pay me enough to touch a Windows server. Actually maybe Fairfax could.

I have just received an invite and busy playing with myself as I only know a couple of others with Wave accounts… or at least that’s it according to my GMail contact list. If you have Wave, add me and send me a wave. My address.

AKA: Sharing Is Caring.

I’m writing this partly because I’d like to help people shift gear, and partly because many of my friends read interesting things online every day and I’m a nosy bastard and don’t have enough crap to read.

In ancient times, back when stone was being beaten into simple tools and wheels were being invented, people read their news on large sheets of pulp. The papers would even be delivered to your house so that you didn’t have to venture farther past your over-grown, under-loved garden, and you could find out how the world devolved today before you even had pants on.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and news was being displayed as pixels on computer screens. The problem with this was that you had to visit various different sites. Bookmarking them all, and visiting, waiting for their epileptic-fit-inducing banner ads to display before you could even get a list of the available articles. So some days you’d forget, and some days you’d spend in bed recovering from yesterday’s seizures.
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RIAA sends a crusader to Wellington with the aim of encouraging the government to reinstate s92a as it was originally planned in its original undemocratic glory.

He has also brought with him almost 20,000 comic books that will be given to school children. The latter strikes me as a better approach, even though it will no doubt be full of fear-mongering. But education seems to me as being the right alternative to bad law.

With so many governments jumping on the “let’s disconnect pirates” bandwagon, it strikes me as a pertinent time to offer up an alternative.

First why do we need an alternative? Shouldn’t pirates be disconnected so they can’t re-offend? Perhaps from one point of view; however the same governments that want to disconnect people also seem to think that Internet access is a human right. So how do we get into a situation where the same people are giving us two completely opposed views in different sentences?

First off, let’s figure out what contributes to making the Internet a human right.
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