Funding to make this forum secure

bigfutz · Jul 14, 2012

I would like to make a proposition to collect funding to make transmissions on this on this forum encrypted. This would in effect put the little lock and HTTPS in place, the one you see when making a credit card purchase online, making it impossible to monitor posts in transit. The content would still sit on the server as it does now, but the hosting provider would have to knowingly release the information to whoever.

It is possible, by purchasing a Secure Certificate and installing it on the server.
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=2050915

If we passed the plate, would anyone pledge to put something in? Admins, how much would it cost?

Parhams0508 · Jul 14, 2012

Sure! I'm game!

trouble63 · Jul 14, 2012

sounds like a good idea to me also, i'm on that wagon.

Jim

Placid · Jul 16, 2012

is there a reason this should be secured? maybe some of the posts include meeting times at the range...but we all got guns then ...soo...uhh...

bigfutz · Jul 16, 2012

Placid said:
is there a reason this should be secured? maybe some of the posts include meeting times at the range...but we all got guns then ...soo...uhh...

Paranoia, duh!

I guess even if the transmission was secure (content could not be scraped or monitored for keywords), the existence of SOME transmission between YOUR Internet account and this shooting related site is undeniable. Making it secure might even raise a red flag. NEVERMIND!!!

04ctd · Jul 16, 2012

i noticed this forum seemed to get "hacked" a few times previous.

if we need to round a few dollars, we could do that to make it more better?

C_Carson · Jul 16, 2012

Since I am not IT-savvy, I don't quite get the intent suggested here. You want to make it so this site can't be monitored by the guys in black suits, or just so it can't be hacked by spammers?

Regardless, if it's still something you want to propose to the staff, Pops handles the IT side of things, and such matters are best directed to him.

Paco · Jul 16, 2012

bigfutz said:
Placid said:

is there a reason this should be secured? maybe some of the posts include meeting times at the range...but we all got guns then ...soo...uhh...

Click to expand...

Paranoia, duh! I guess even if the transmission was secure (content could not be scraped or monitored for keywords), the existence of SOME transmission between YOUR Internet account and this shooting related site is undeniable. Making it secure might even raise a red flag. NEVERMIND!!!

The board can be crawled regardless of HTTP or HTTPS. Otherwise the board would not be readable to guests.

MGMorden · Jul 16, 2012

I'm not seeing the point here either (and having a BS in Computer Science and ~11 years experience in IT, I would probably consider myself computer savy

).

The only part of a forum that really needs to be secure is the login. You don't want passwords transmitted in plain text. Other than that though, by their very nature they have to be readable by the public.

If you're that concerned about your IP being logged as visiting a firearms site (a fear that I'd consider a bit unreasonable, but that's your choice

), check out The Onion Router (TOR). https://www.torproject.org/

Using that it masks your web site visits through wrapped layers of encryption (hence the "onion" reference). Traffic gets encrypted multiple times, with each hop giving the next one the info to peel off one layer. The only hop that knows the destination is the last one and the only one that knows the requestor is the first. Ergo, most nodes know neither, but no individual node along the way knows both a) whats being transmitted and b) who sent it.

Its a lot more anonymous and secure than having the whole site using https.

Pops · Jul 17, 2012

The use of an SSL certificate will encrypt the data packets as they passes across the interent.
Of course all that encrypting and decrypting puts a lot of extra work on the server and the client computer.
If you go to an ecommerce site you'll notice that the only time you're in an https environment is when you actually go to the checkout process

As far as being monitored by any federal agency, all they would need to do is create an account and come in as any other member. Who would know?
We've always had a very open forum and a community environment. Nothing clandestine going on here . . .

I understand and appreciate your concern, but SSL encryption won't create the kind of privacy you seem to be looking for.
It's not real expensive, it costs about $60 per year plus the management part.

It is possible to create sections that only "those on the list" can read or gain access to, but we actually want the search engines to crawl the forum and index the knowledge found here.
it helps people find us using google. We spend time and effort trying to optimize the site for this very purpose.

Pops

bigfutz · Jul 18, 2012

I said nevermind already

After thinking about it, HTTPS would make it look like we are trying to be sneaky. Just remember everyone, don't ever put any information in a page w/o Https (lock icon) that might be use to steal your identity... that includes PMs and emails.