Tag Archives: encryption

Securing Your Online Access for E-mail, Research Data

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When you are managing online information, you are probably storing some of that information online, whether it’s your Web-based e-mail or your online bookmarks.  I wrote a piece for the Slaw.ca blog in September on using encrypted connections.  But your connection is just one piece of the puzzle.

Google has added a help tool in its support area to help you assess your online security.  It is a checklist that walks you through a number of possible risk areas, including your computer, your Web browser, your Google accounts and, if you use it, your Gmail settings.  In some ways, it’s almost too general to be helpful.  It doesn’t actually test anything.  But if you aren’t sure what your possible threat areas are, it may be able to identify some of them.  It even has a progress meter, to show how many of the steps you’ve completed.  This meter didn’t actually work for me, but if it does for you, it can help you to get a sense of how much work you might need to do to harden your online access!

[via Lifehacker]

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Google Encrypted Moves: Lawyers Search Confidentially

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I mentioned that Google was enabling an encrypted search, which may be a preferable way to search on topics that you need to keep confidential.  They have moved the search from:

https://www.google.com

to

https://encrypted.google.com

The new URL enables some organizations to use encrypted search while keeping their Web filters in place.  It may not be a permanent move.

[ via ReadWriteWeb , eWeek]

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Is Encrypted Search Part of Your Future?

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When you perform legal research using online tools, you leave a trace of the information you seek.  Whether you are using a client or party name or topical keywords related to your matter, your keywords are logged by search engines.  In fee-based databases, it is just the publisher who tracks this information; on the Web, each Web site you visit will see your search terms.  More importantly, if you are using an insecure network, like a home or coffee shop wireless network, other people may be able to tap into your search stream and see what you are researching.  The reality is that online research in fee-based or free tools is relatively focused, so searches are unlikely to divulge much on their own.

There may still be some times that you want to keep your search encrypted, though.  In the past, this has meant encrypting your entire online experience, using a virtual private network (VPN) or connecting only to Web sites using the secure sockets layer.  On those sites, the Web address changes from http:// to https://, reflecting an encrypted connection.

If you add that s to Google’s address – https://www.google.com/ – you will arrive at Google’s new encrypted search service, which has just moved to beta.  It is hard to know whether this is a trend in search and how long it will be in beta.  But it means that when you search, your search terms are not available to third parties, whether the sites that you visit online or people around you who might be able to see your online activity.  There may be some research where, just for peace of mind, you will feel better trying the encrypted Google for your research.

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Synchronizing Your Web Browser Experience

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Lawyers often work in more than one place, the office and the home being the most common.  Even if you are a mobile legal researcher, you may work on multiple computers, each with a copy of your favorite Web browser installed.  Ideally, you would be able to keep the information current and the same on each system.  While you can often synchronize bookmarks – Google Chrome has bookmark sync built in and you can use Xmarks on the other browsers – you may find yourself out of sync with your other browser preferences.

Mozilla Firefox users can take advantage of the experimental Weave add-on.  It is a project out of Mozilla Labs and is a secure sync tool that will upload your Web browser settings – what is in the Awesome bar, your open tabs, your bookmarks, and other preferences, including passwords – to a Mozilla server.  You will notice once you have installed the add-on that not only do you need to create a username and password for your Weave account, but you are required to have a passphrase to enable the encryption of your content and, without which, your uploaded information is inaccessible.

Google Chrome users can use the Sync feature (still in beta) within the Web browser that will synchronize your bookmarks, preferences, and browser themes.  This is not the Firefox browser sync add-on that Google has discontinued; they recommend Weave as a substitute!  Like the Weave add-on, it does not synchronize your other add-ons or extensions.  Unlike Weave, your information (excluding passwords) is uploaded to your Google account and is not encrypted.

Some Firefox users have gone beyond the synchronization possible through Weave and are using online storage sites, liked Dropbox.com, to store their Firefox profiles, including add-ons.  Since you can have multiple computers connected to your free Dropbox account, it means you can configure each computer to use your Dropbox folder on your computer for your Firefox profile.  Lifehacker has an older post that talks about using Portable Firefox, and keeping your entire Firefox application in sync.  Here is a more detailed method of using Dropbox to store just the profile information.

While you can avoid all of this by researching from a single computer, that isn’t always possible.  Using synchronization tools to keep your research environment as similar as possible across different computers can save you time.

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