LinkLocker

As I've discussed before, this site uses an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt. Overall I believe they are doing the world a great service by offering certificates for free, but some recent events may be demonstrating a grave problem with their approach—and maybe even with the broader approach taken by implementations of SSL in general. To wit, the recent talk of 14,000 fake-PayPal phishing sites using valid SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt has brought to the forefront what is to my mind one of the potentially fatal flaws in the way we handle encrypted traffic over the Web: the fact that encryption and trust have somehow gotten lumped together as a single monolithic thing in the eyes of most consumers. If a site has a green lock, it's "safe," and that's all there is to it. Unfortunately, that's just not a great way to look at the Web.

There has never been a more perfect time to start being proactive about privacy than this moment, right now, at the end of 2016. The surveillance state is out of control—and it's currently being overseen by a relatively sane administration. Just think about how a Trump presidency might want to put to use the vast troves of personal data about you and your interests. A number of thoughts come to mind, and there isn't a pretty one in the bunch.

And it ...

LinkLocker uses a certificate provided by Let's Encrypt to enable TLS 1.2 encryption over https. Let's Encrypt is a not-for-profit initiative to spread the use of encrypted transfer to as much of the Web as possible. Their certificates provide verification that a site is what it says it is, and allow for fully encrypted data transfer between two parties (in LinkLocker's case, this means between our server and your computer). These certificates have in the past been costly to obtain, thus ...

I just want to make a couple of quick assurances about data storage, with respect to both security and to redundancy...

The biggest reason why I decided to make LinkLocker is that none of the bookmarking / content hoarding services on the market are really taking their users' privacy seriously. In many ways, privacy is often an afterthought even in the very best case scenarios when it comes to online services, and after several years of wondering when we'd start to see products that were truly concerned about protecting customers and their data, I was really feeling pretty frustrated with the state of things on the ...