Reflective?

In the past year I've managed a mere 25 posts here. On my old blog I had 300 odd posts over three years. I'm not sure what happened to my writing. On the blog for my dad I just updated, 212 posts there, most of them written by me, most in a three and a half week span. Maybe that is why I am currently blogged out.

Actually I don't think that anybody visits this blog anymore, so it will be a surprise for somebody when they do again.

It was really weird to update the blog for my dad again. It starts bring back emotions really quickly, at some point I need to go back and re-read it. As I noted in the post mentioned, it is almost the only remaining evidence that anything ever happened. My dad is up and running normally enough, I am the only one that is still catching up on work from last fall. I guess that blog -- both literally and symbolically -- represents what has probably been the most singularly important event in my life.

Watching Bethel

Latest time lapse of the new BU Commons, rendered this morning.

Gmail/SSL

FYI: This is only for the geeky, not for anyone that generally follows this blog (if anybody still does).

On a mailing list that I subscribe to there was some talk as to whether Gmail will keep all traffic encrypted or not. Considering that I use Gmail, this was of some importance to me. So I used a packet sniffer (Wireshark) to monitor Gmail for a few hours.

After going through the Wireshark log (which took a bit!) the only non-SSL/TLS traffic from Gmail I could find looked like this:


ET /safebrowsing/update?client

=navclient-auto-ffox&appver=2.0.0.11&version=goog-white-domain:1:30,goog-white-url:1:371,goog-black-url:1:19069,goog-black-enchash:1:46040
HTTP/1.1
Host: sb.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11)
Gecko/20071204 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: PREF=ID=2ebc725f67fb2226:TM=1185368577:LM=1204091083:FV=2:GM=1:S=wxIX6A2MoEz-E_jQ;
NID=7=idUEA3RlV2HdMJnwhlss9BlI_xHRanyp-YhurpGmW2VRTJRbQtFLMGUCaA4DM2EbxvWUdUmDM4QocyqrcNaAzeezJah8ZVR025-cv7ZI1pmmQFGztHdIOpBmOrAHmnnb;
rememberme=true; TZ=360; GMAIL_RTT=199;
SID=DQAAAHkAAADzxZbZSOLdabfqK8Sg1BqQiOfOHP_vmkzA86-1aZ6g6qK4ny6F2kgvPQk2w2L6NXGwI7d6eN7TC1ZT2otnoPuen1GljghnYC6w9F6o56AB1UB_LIaHO1CfI5VgfDr_JTUBy29vzneXPb6EbemlUPJ8tq0p_Kp6ysh90MNmjupnRw

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Cache-Control: public,max-age=600
Server: TrustRank Frontend
Content-Length: 40363
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:48:54 GMT

[goog-black-enchash 1.46041 update]
-181A72096A3A5F5A6B5CE3D22D4990DC
+1ADDDA4E33D074B417D9032C0074E54B.Z1YySDViZ1cwW70PPccj6T76+VSLmilYHD4snvGWoJZDwmAzbDdxaDCGZQsJiCtQadFG7eZ2X6DeDa1bmIm2rUV+UkvCzR7eyfQ+raZEmhGeN+mJMsQnhgwogxfy
+32B06F940FF6E48A2FE609B51E416C58.ckkydGZxM2uxa3j+ksQIJoP044ACSApNlQwR1Hx3orZ+53tHaJmUOAxHjOP9ApeQzZjxW/2iepjX+SVeDnkMLSu6at81oCpjXI8cfBkYg1ntKazdBBraDzoh31YCI5mgLgj2iybtFg==
-409CA5195CFE1F8B615C0CF72343DE19


Except that the whole thing was ~41kb.

So, while not an exhaustive study by any means, it *does* look like Gmail will stick to SSL, or some type of encryption (I have no idea what "goog-blacl-enchash" means, but it certainly isn't plaintext).

If anyone wants to look through the packet dump let me know, it's about 4mb uncompressed after I filtered out traffic that I knew wasn't from Google (from a cron job I have going), I'd be glad to post it somewhere.