[SGVLUG] Polling Web Sites

[Christopher Smith]

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Christopher Smith wrote:
> John E. Kreznar wrote:
>> bb.odenthal at gmail.com writes:
>>> Of course, using the --no-check-certificate option does have its
>>> security drawbacks.  Without it you'll have to get wget to trust the
>>> certiaficate authority which can be a little cumbersome but well
>>> worth the effort.  Good luck.
>> What's really wanted is a general procedure for converting from
>> connection-based security such as SSL to message-based security such
>> as PGP, without any loss of security.  It's deeply irritating that
>> sites try to impose real-time communication in the first place, when
>> the situation would be better served by exchange of thoughtful
>> messages.  But given that they do, there's a want for converting from
>> one to the other.  Slow folks like me want to be able to download a
>> form and ponder it for a day or a week before filling it in and
>> returning it.  Ideas?
> 
> Actually, SSL isn't really connection based. It's session based (indeed,
> it is entirely possible to do SSL over UDP), and in that sense PGP is
> basically the same. PGP and S/MIME have a few things specifically for
> e-mail, and they are built around the notion of sessions living the life
> of a message (much as most uses of SSL are tied to sessions living as
> long as a TCP connection).

As usual I was hit by the clue stick pretty much right after I sent it.
The negotiation process in SSL does kind of assume a lot of round trips
between the two end points, and *that* might be the problem you were
getting at. For this kind of problem, that doesn't really matter though.
You could negotiate an initial session and then just continue to use
that session over multiple connections via TCP.

As for forms you can ponder offline for a while:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XForms

- --Chris
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