With the launch of Firefox v42 (and up) they introduced an adBlocker in the browser. The ad blocking feature is available (by default) during the use of Private Browsing.
But if you don't want to see those advertisements, and for some reason you don't want to use Private Browsing (like me), than you're out of luck (by default). There's no normal way to enable this feature without the use of Private Browsing (or use an adBlocker add-on for Firefox). Thankfully, Firefox uses a config module in which you can tweak almost everything.... including the Tracking Protection.
In my line of work I get to work with a lot of security devices which run self-signed certificates. Those certificates are most of the time generated when the device / appliance is installed, or configured for the very first time. When you connect to one of those devices with a web browser, you tend to see the warnings displayed by the browser that the connection is not to be trusted.
In Firefox, you can add an exception in the browser. When you've done that, the next time you go to the website, the browsers treats the website as trusted.
A fairy long title, but it describes exactly what this post is about. Once again a post about a Microsoft product and the way it works (or rather doesn't work) with your average Internet standard.
This week I was busy with RADIUS, 802.1x, PKI and the protection of websites with SSL encryption. For the implementation of 802.1x, I needed a PKI environment, so I used the Microsoft Certificate Services for that purpose. Along the way, I needed an SSL certificate for an internal website, but this particular website needed to work properly based on different FQDN's and or IP addresses without throwing warining or errors regarding the SSL connection.
The way to do this is to add Subject Alternative Names (SAN) to the certificate. This enables you to access the website in different ways, e.g.;
- Access a webmail host from the internet based on its official FQDN (https://webmail.somedomain.com)
- Access the same webmail host from the inside of the corporate lan based on its internal name (https://webmail.acme.local)
- And access the host from legacy DNS-unaware software on its IP address (https://192.168.1.254)
While the content on my website increases, it's getting (a bit) harder to find certain content. Sure, there's this search form in the top right of the website, but this means that you have to open the website first, enter the keyword and hit 'Enter'.
To speed things up I created a custom FireFox search engine. Using this I can search for content on my website directly from the browser. No matter what site I'm currently on.
The custom search engines are located in the profiles directory.
OSX: ~/Library/Application Data/Firefox/profiles/<random>/searchplugins/<searchengine>.xml
Windows: c:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<random>\searchplugins\<searchengine>.xml
By adding the following XML file (right-click - Save As) to the directory listed above, you add the Redelijkheid.com search engine to your Firefox search engines.
Due to the nature of my work, and my fondness of Apple products I wasn't able to get my Aladdin eTokens working with OSX. After several months of not trying to crack this I decided to try it again.
The trigger for me was stumbling on the possibility of adding so-called keyfiles to the eToken for accessing TrueCrypt volumes.
First challenge was the eToken PKI software for OSX... Thankfully I'm a Certified eToken guru, so I've got access to their download area (you will have to get your own software). The current version of the eToken software for OSX is v4.55. I installed the Aladdin software on OSX 10.5.5.
;)
