The dirty little secret about SSL certificates is that:

The tools to become a certificate authority, and therefore to publish your own SSL certificates, is included in a wide variety of systems – chances are if you have an Ubuntu or CentOS install you already have the capability of becoming an SSL certificate authority via OpenSSL.

Firesheep by Eric Butler has just been released to the world. This Firefox plugin does a few things that have already been fairly easy to do for a while, but rolled up in one easy to use package:

1. Sniffs data on unencrypted Wireless Networks
2. Looks for unencrypted login cookies sent to known popular insecure sites
3. Allows you to login to that account with ‘One Click’

So what sites are impacted by default? Amazon.com, Basecamp, bit.ly, Cisco, CNET, Dropbox, Enom, Evernote, Facebook, Flickr, Github, Google, HackerNews, Harvest, Windows Live, NY Times, Pivotal Tracker, Slicehost, tumblr, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, and Yelp are among the few. A plugin system allows anyone to add their own sites (and cookie styles) to the plugin.

Yikes! It goes without saying that this is a major security problem for anyone who uses unencrypted wireless networks. Includes on this list are many universities and companies such as Starbucks.

It is very easy to create a random file using the linux command line. Much like the command to fill a file with all zeros, for example a 1 Meg file: dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.filename bs=1024 count=1000 You do the same using /dev/urandom: dd if=/dev/urandom of=random.filename bs=1024 count=1000 Resulting in a 1MB file: 1000+0 records in [...]