Thanks to both of you. There is so much that could be said about the security and passwords.
The main point of this thread is that Google is recommending that all communications be made more secure and that there should not be any areas in the network where plaintext would be visible to non-authorized personnel.
An argument has been made that some people need to have the right or privilege of looking into your e-mail and your website. But many disagree with that. One of the issues that goes back to 1934 when the communications act was established in the United States was the issue of privacy in communication. At that time it was agreed that all kinds of communication should be under the authority of one central agency, the FCC, and that both radio and telephone conversations were to be considered private even if they were not encoded. Put another way, it was just this illegal to eavesdrop on somebody's telephone conversation as it was to open up their mail. And that policy would also apply on private communications that was being done over two way radio.
But now we're in a period of time where the whole idea of citizens rights to confidential privacy are being questioned. At the present time some of the biggest companies, Apple, Google and Microsoft, have taken the position that they will protect the privacy of individuals.
This would not prevent law enforcement agencies from getting a warrant and seeking to investigate private communications that have taken place. However, some take the position that law enforcement agencies should be able snoop on your communications at any time they want to. The assertion has been made that this is the only way to protect the country from organized terrorists.
Really, any organization that has the resources can find ways to hide information that would be very difficult for government agencies to discover unless nobody is allowed to use any kind of VPN, virtual private network.
As for myself, I don't say or do things that are against the law, but still I am not comfortable with other people listening into my conversations or reading my mail. Hopefully private communications will remain private.
Now about Wi-Fi. It has been recommended that all Wi-Fi links use some form of encryption. Otherwise it is much too easy to pick up somebodies access point and see all the information that is being passed back and forth from the client to the access point. Encryption of the data between access points and client ensures that other people can't just drive by and pick up a wireless signal and see what other people are talking about. However, wireless encryption does not help us on the Internet. If the Internet information is not encrypted, then using wireless encryption doesn't do a thing to prevent somebody from tapping in to a wired connection. Of course, tapping into a wired connection is very illegal and probably would be noticed by somebody. Still, full encryption on the Internet would do quite a bit to improve personal privacy.
This is a plain text message and does not contain nay hidden codes.
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Just ignore the above. I was just clearing my throat while using speech recognition.