My favorite Firefox add-ons

  • Perspectives – Designed by a CMU research team, Perspectives asks and answers important information about self-signed security certificates. Self-signed security certificates are really only an issue if they are part of a man in the middle attack or put up by a malicious user. Thousands of legitimate websites use self signed certificates. Perspectives asks if 1) the same certificate can be seen by notaries in different parts of the internet? Aka: Is this a man-in-the-middle attack? 2) How long have the notaries been seeing this certificate? Aka: Is this a malicious website that was just setup?
  • Ghostery – Tracks and notifies you about companies who are tracking you across the internet. It also gives you the choice to turn off their tracking cookies on a per company basis.
  • Web Developer – A must have for anyone doing web design.
  • Adblock Plus – Ok, I don’t always like seeing ads on the internet and this is a great way to block them. Also gives me the ability to turn ads on for websites I really want to support.

Updates:

  • Firebug – An excellent plug-in for debugging web pages. Makes it easy to drill down on particular elements and make live changes to its style.

Online shopping, privacy, tracking and me on tv

KDKA news, in Pittsburgh, did an article on the FTC’s new ‘Do Not Track’ List proposal.

The exciting news is that I have a silent role in the video as a “shopper” and I’m using Ghostery.