I've seen lots of privacy things happen in my time on the internet. Mostly, it is sending an email in confidence to a friend who then forwards it to your enemies. No encryption scheme can help that.
My advice, is never write anything on the internet except things that you would like published widely. It probably will be. There are still archives of things I wrote 25 years ago, available to search on Google.
Joe.
On Apr 3, 2004, at 10:56 AM, Oliver Schnarchendorf wrote:
On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 11:42:46 -0500, gohaku wrote:Okay. There are a few things you need to know about the internet.I just read this weblog post: Security, Earthlink, and Apple URL: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1599 My question, is using Earthlink's webmail just as secure as the SSL Connection and why was Daniel's log in and password revealed???
(a) every communication on networks is in clear text
(b) all the computers between you and your target server are able to read communications.
(c) wireless networks are just another kind of network.
(d) wireless networks make it simpler to spy upon network content. The WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) can be broken just by running some code that listens to a big number of network packages and automatically extracts the encryption key.
Now that you know the above lets go back to your question: Is Earthlink's webmail just as secure as an SSL connection? Just IF you connect to the webmail service using SSL (https://). Otherwise it's still readable as clear text.
/oliver/
Joseph Alotta 409 North Washington Street Westmont, IL 60559 (630) 969-2628 jalotta_at_earthlink_dot_net
