Archive for September 13th, 2007
It’s my new budgie. I took the opportunity of being able to drive Mum’s car last weekend and went to the local pet store to select a budgie and bring him/her back in relative comfort – the alternative being on my (push) bike.
No name or pictures yet, I’m not even sure on the sex as he/she is only 6 weeks old.
Came across a tip last night that shows how to make all your web browsing about as private as reasonably possible when at work/school.
Most techies know how to hide your web browsing habits using ssh as a proxy server, but some might not realise that clues can still be found in your dns requests. Basically while the actual web traffic (http and https) go over the ssh/proxy tunnel, the dns requests to those web site are still made to your local dns server. It wouldn’t take that much effort to work out which servers you were visiting by the dns requests.
However there is a solution if you are using Firefox. Type about:config into the address bar then search for ‘socks_remote’. By default this value is set to false, double click to change to true. Now the dns requests that Firefox makes will also go over the ssh/proxy tunnel.
It worked for me last night with no real problems, but I’ve not tested any complicated web sites (read: web sites that pull from different servers and domains). I also have no idea if this setting should be turned to false when not using the ssh/proxy tunnel, I shouldn’t think so but I’ve not tested this.
