This is really cool. The electronic frontier foundation (eff) has released a plugin for Firefox that defaults the browser to using a secure connection to some popular websites. https is basically encrypted traffic... anyone between you and the website can't see what's going on because all the traffic is encrypted. It's not 100% fool proof, but it's way better than sending everything (including password) in plain text.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/e ... -extension

May I suggest all you Firefox users grab a copy? If the web were entirely encrypted, governments and private corporations would have a much harder time trying to track and censor people.

If you need a non https version of a site that's included in the extension, you can go into add-ons and into the options for the extension and switch it off for certain pages. I switched it off for google, for instance, because I use iGoogle, which doesn't have an HTTPS version.