KL encrypts project sites
Security and privacy are becoming increasingly important. Unencrypted sites allow persons with malintent and the right knowledge to see what you are doing online, which information you submit in forms, which pages you visit, which reports you download, and so on.
- KL'ers involved
- Maarten Zeinstra
We have, give or take, thirty project sites running on our servers, including projects like Creative Commons Netherlands, InnovatieImpuls Onderwijs, Videorooter etc. Taking care of the security and privacy of such a variety of projects takes some effort.
Security and privacy are becoming increasingly important, though. Unencrypted sites allow persons with malintent and the right knowledge to see what you are doing online, which information you submit in forms, which pages you visit, which reports you download, and so on. In recent years this has proven to be a problem, and activists started to urge people to move to encrypted connections.
How encryption works
Encryption used to be an unforeseen and relatively expensive cost for our projects, having to buy an SSL certificate and change a lot of settings manually on each site. We only did this in case visitors of those sites could make financial transactions or submit sensitive information. This includes the main site of Kennisland (kl.nl) and our spin-off voorjebuurt.nl.
Let’s encrypt!
A great new tool has now significantly lowered the barriers for encryption of web traffic: Letsencrypt.org, recently out of beta, is an initiative with over 35 large corporate sponsors like Mozilla, Akamai, EFF, and many other big players who care about the Internet infrastructure. It provides an open-source tool to automatically add free SSL certificates to domains.
This tool allows us to offer encrypted traffic on all our websites with little additional required resources. It means now we can not only encrypt transactions, but also obfuscate the data you download from our sites, offering more privacy and protection than before.
We have enabled SSL for all our project sites++Project sitesThis means all project sites we host on our own servers. We cannot guarantee that this appears on all websites of projects that Kennisland is involved in.. If you encounter any issues, please get in touch with Maarten at mz@kl.nl. Let’s get the web encrypted!
- KL'ers involved
- Maarten Zeinstra mz@kl.nl
