howto use https in favour of http

[Scott Bennett]

     On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:32:21 -0400 Michael Powell <nightrecon at hotmail.com>
wrote:
>Scott Bennett wrote:
>
>
>>>> Alexander Best wrote:
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> i've added the following line to my /etc/hosts:
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> permail.uni-muenster.de:25      permail.uni-muenster.de:443
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> so what i want is for freebsd to never use http, but https for that
>>>>>>> address.
>[snip] 
>
>Perhaps the easiest direct solution is to bookmark 
>
>https://permail.uni-muenster.de/ in the browser bookmarks instead of
>
>http://permail.uni-muenster.de/
>
     If he wants to apply the HTTPS requirement only to a particular page
(e.g., the home page) at a web site, that *might* work.  OTOH, there may
be points of failure, such as this example in the page whose URL is shown
above.

	<a href="http://www.permail.uni-muenster.de"
	rel="subsection"
	>

Depending upon a bookmark would also fail to apply the restriction to any
links to other pages at the same site that the user might click on on the
page.  It also ignores the many dozens (hundreds?) of security problems
that are fixed/blocked by plug-ins like NoScript and Torbutton.
     Once NoScript has been installed, it is plenty easy, as I outlined
previously, to apply such a restriction to an entire web site or to all
web sites in a given domain.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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