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Internet Slowdown Protest

On September 10th websites protested online by displaying a symbolic loading symbol on their sites. The results measured by the number of calls, emails and comments conveyed to the FCC, Congress and the White house were strong. This is very important to us now. It is difficult to imagine our lives before the Internet. In May, 2014 I wrote about Net Neutrality. The US focused article on Net Neutrality in the United States helps to summarize and remind us of some relevant history dating back an century and a half. “While the term is new, the ideas underlying net neutrality have a long pedigree in telecommunications practice and regulation. The concept of network neutrality originated in the age of the telegram in 1860 or even earlier, where standard (pre-overnight telegram) telegrams were routed ‘equally’ without discerning their contents and adjusting for one application or another. Such networks are ‘end-to-end neutral’.”

We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.

HTTPS Everywhere

Web sites who install an SSL/TLS certificate allow the encryption of web browser traffic. Why should you care? Awareness for this need was raised for the public in April 2014 by the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug. HTTPS is especially useful in preventing eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks when using public Wi-Fi access points.

Encrypting web browser traffic is done with HTTP Secure. This provides an additional level of privacy between your computer and web sites you view by layering SSL/TLS over HTTP. TLS replaces SSL as of 1999.

On my computer I installed a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Firefox for Android and Opera. The extension makes my browser default to prefer the use of HTTPS when possible. "HTTPS Everywhere is produced as a collaboration between the The TOR Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

When reading about the use of HTTPS Everywhere I was surprised to find an entry related to berkeleylug.com. I hope to work with our LUG members to update our website and links to embedded content to automatically rewrite the requests of web browsers to our web server.

We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.