[real-eyes] Google to Offer Encrypted Search Next Week

From: Steven Clark <kcpadfoot@xxxxxxxxx>
To: real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 08:11:43 -0500
The following article is from wired.com
Steve

Google to Offer Encrypted Search Next Week
By  Ryan Singel
Google will begin letting users run encrypted searches on its flagship 
search site
Google.com starting next week, the company said in a blog post Thursday.
Allowing users to search using https - the web security system which 
many associate
with online banking and shopping — would mark a first for a major search 
engine,
and could begin a move by web services such as social networks to begin 
offering
encryption for more than just log-ins. Such increased adoption would cut 
down on
network eavesdropping and also have the added benefit of preventing some 
online attacks.
Ironically, the announcement of the upcoming change came in a
long blog post
  explaining that the search company had been “mistakenly” eavesdropping 
and recording
what people were doing on unencrypted wi-fi networks as its Street View 
cars were
taking pictures of cities around the world and recording the IDs of wifi 
networks
and routers. That data is used to help geo-locate people using devices 
without GPS,
but the company has said for years it was not collecting session data.
Google turned on encryption — better known as https:// — as a default 
for Gmail users
earlier this year. That encrypts the data sent between a user’s browser 
and Google’s
servers, making it nearly impossible for someone in the middle to read 
the contents
of that e-mail. When not using SSL, a user of a school or corporate 
network can have
their e-mail and web traffic content read by authorities who control the 
network,
while anyone using an open Wi-Fi connection can have their traffic 
sniffed by a hacker
using simple tools.
Gmail was the first major webmail service to offer encryption for full 
sessions,
rather than just for log-ins. Google allowed power users to use https:// 
for years,
and under pressure from privacy and security advocates turned it into 
the default
for all users earlier this year. In contrast, Gmail’s competitors 
including Yahoo
Mail or Microsoft’s Hotmail don’t even offer https sessions as an option.
Using https, rather than http, is not technically difficult, but the 
authenticating
handshakes between a server and a browser do require more resources from 
both a server
and the browser. That means it costs a company more to run a service and 
can slow
down an application.
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[real-eyes] Google to Offer Encrypted Search Next Week

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