The Lair of the SlowFox

Hull's been hosting its Freedom Festival across the weekend, timed I think to coincide with the start of the Round the World Clipper Race that started here this time around.

Anyway, today saw P and I wend our way up to Hull Marina to see The Red Arrows perform a display that must've lasted at least 40 minutes. Very impressive flying, and some of the moves were, frankly, terrifying. So that was well worth seeing.

We then ambled down from the Marina to Queens Gardens to listen to some live music over lunch, and then headed back up to the river to watch the Clippers set off on their round the world race - due back in July 2010. Ten ships in full sail along the Humber was an impressive sight - our ship is Hull and Humber, but the Jamaicans won the prize for best name with Lightning Bolt.

I think I've managed to restore access to gMail: as tikiberry commented, although Google's initial notice said I'd been ToS'd, further investigation eventually unearthed an explanation that the account had been locked because of 'suspicious activity', and they insisted I change my password. So, password changed. Hmm.

You've probably known this for a long while, but since I've only just got around to doing it, I thought I'd mention...

As this Wired article explains, although gMail asks for your initial log on password via HTTPS (the nice, secure protocol), the rest of your session, under the default settings, is plain HTTP. Which is potentially a problem if you're checking email from a WiFi hotspot or whatever.

Changing this is easy enough, once you know where to look.

Go to Settings (upper right hand side of the screen), and from there you should be on the 'General' tab.

Right at the bottom of the page is a section headed 'Browser Connection', and, as above, the default is 'Don't always use HTTPS'. I've changed my settings to 'always use https', and haven't (yet) noticed any drawbacks.

Now, because HTTPS is encrypted, it does mean that encryption/decryption has to take place at both the client (your machine) and the server (Google's kit), so, in theory, using HTTPS all the time will slow things down a bit.

On the other hand, not using HTTPS means that the communication twixt you and Google's cloud is all in the clear, and is much easier to eavesdrop/snoop on. Especially since a tool was announced at DEFCON last year which made such snooping 'relatively easy'.

So, the general advice (from Wired, above, The Register, here, Mashable, here and the good old Beeb, here) is to always use HTTPS.