Tag: Edge

Categories
Consumer Tech Web Site Technologies

Consumer tech: Edge new tab in Chinese

Intro

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to access a web site in China in your Edge browser, you may find that from that point onwards all your new tab pages display in Chinese despite of your best efforts to eradicate it.

The details

I was in that same boar until today. There are many bad leads out there on the Internet. In fact I never did find the solution on the Internet. I got it from a colleague.

You click on the three dots, go to Settings and search for reset.

Do the Reset. It is a little disruptive, as i have found. It does not delete everything, but it certainly resets some things. As soon as that’s done you will no longer have new tab pages be in Chinese.

Categories
Security

The latest on handling of SHA-1 certificates by the major browsers

Intro
A certain organization is still using SHA-1 certificates internally, in spite of years of warnings, as I write this in February, 2017. But in the security world lack of action = eventual weakness. Ignorance is not bliss and putting your head in the sand is not a viable security strategy. So cracks in their approach are starting to appear, especially with the Chrome browser, the latest version of which is showing their internal SSL sites as not secure.

I found these security blog links in the references section below very helpful in getting a feel for what the major browsers take on all this is. A colleague brought them to my attention.

Solutions
The obvious solution is for them to switch to a PKI based on SHA-256 (also known as SHA-2 for short). But apparently it is like turning an aircraft carrier, or maybe pushing a planet into a different orbit, as bureaucratic inertia keeps progress on this front at the level of barely perceptible.

Here’s an image of that part of Chrome that shows the result of an https Intranet site access:

References and related
These are all from the October – November 2016 time frame.
Google security blog: SHA-1 certificates in Chrome
Mozilla security blog: Phasing Out SHA-1 on the Public Web
Microsoft Edge Developer: SHA-1 deprecation countdown