HTTPS Everywhere is an initiative by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that boosts the security of Firefox with a clever plugin that will automatically encrypt your communications with a number of web services that support HTTPS. This provides an automated way to move users from the insecure HTTP protocol, which is the default for many web sites (like Google and Facebook), even though they may also support HTTPS.
I personally applaud the initiative on a technical level, and if I was a Firefox user, I would install the extension in a heart beat. But, on a fundamental level, the extension will fail to make any real improvement in the security of the web for one simple reason – users are the biggest weakness in any security system, and there is no patch for users.
By: Matthew Casperson
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